1881 .] 
219 
[Putnr.m. 
the leaf-mould. Most of the pits are of about the same diameter 
from top to bottom, but several have been found which are one 
or two feet wider at the bottom than at the top. At the bottom 
of some of the pits a small circular excavation has been found, 
either directly in the centre or on one side. 
That nearly all of the four hundred pits thus far discovered in 
the cemetery were made before the six hundred bodies whose 
skeletons have been exhumed, were buried, is shown by the 
fact that a large number of the skeletons were found over the 
pits, and most of the burials seem to have been made just below 
the recent soil or leaf-mould, which, so far as I could judge from 
my hasty observations, seems to have been formed over the pits. 
If this should prove to be the case, the antiquity of the pits 
would be, probably, considerably beyond that of the four or five 
hundred years indicated by the large forest trees growing over 
them. That the place had been also used as a cemetery at a time 
preceding the digging of some of the pits, was conclusively shown 
by the fact that skeletons found at a depth of from one to two 
feet in the hard-pan, below the leaf-mould, had been disturbed 
when the pits were dug. In one instance, in my own exploration 
of a pit, the upper part of a human skull was found just outside 
the wall of the pit; the rest of the skeleton, probably, had been 
removed when the pit was dug. In a few other instances Dr. 
Metz has noticed that a skeleton had been disturbed and the 
bones placed in unnatural positions on the sides of a pit, as if, 
when making the excavation, the workers had come upon a skel- 
eton and had carefully taken up such of the bones as were in the 
way and placed them with the undisturbed bones on one side or 
the other. But this complication of facts in regard to the com- 
parative age of the pits and the burials, is only one of the many 
problems to be solved in relation to this interesting locality. 
The contents of the pits themselves are of peculiar interest, 
and the purpose for which they were made is still, I think, a mys- 
tery, although, of course, several theories, more or less plausible, 
have been advanced. 
The average pit may be said to be filled with ashes in more or 
less defined layers. Some of these layers, particularly near the 
