READING 

 THE EARTH 



By Jeannie Faris 



State archaeologist Mark Mathis 

 dreads finding human burials when he 

 excavates a prehistoric Native Ameri- 

 can site. He'd rather not unearth bones 

 laid to rest centuries ago by societies 

 that took great measures to honor their 

 dead. 



"We try to deal with it as reverently 

 as possible," says Mathis, who works 

 for the N.C. Office of State Archaeol- 

 ogy. "We do (exhumations) because we 

 have to, rather than see them de- 

 stroyed." 



But human burials are among the 

 most revealing remnants of prehistoric 

 Indian societies that left few clues and 

 no written language to memorialize 

 their way of life. 



And increasingly, researchers find 

 themselves running a losing race 

 against the clock — against the eroding 

 forces of nature, the farmers' plows and 

 the bulldozers of developers — to find 

 coastal Indian sites and salvage their 

 contents before they are destroyed. 



"Unfortunately, where the early 

 settlers and Indians lived is where we 

 like to live," Mathis says. "That's a 

 conflict." 



Among the dozens of burials 

 exhumed in coastal North Carolina are 

 mass collections of bones called 

 ossuaries, a ceremonious mixing 

 together of people who died over a span 

 of time in a town or village. Common 

 themes run throughout the excavated 

 burials, but the differences are espe- 

 cially telling about a society. 



Some ossuaries contain carefully 

 placed, distinct bundles of bones. These 

 are usually the remains of the noble or 

 ruling class that had been scraped of 

 flesh and stored in special charnel 

 houses until the burial ceremony. 



Still other graves are small pits 

 containing a single body, possibly a 

 commoner, with the knees flexed up to 

 the chest in a fetal position. 



8 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992 



