217 
coj)per tliat were either discarded or lost when they moved awa}". 
The old village sites in southeastern Ontario and along the St. Law- 
rence contain, in addition, amazing (luantities of broken pottery, and 
pottery (which, though fragile, is almost indestructible) a]jpears 
near the International Boundary in all three Ih'airie Provinces. The 
dry soil along the Fraser river in the interior of British Columbia 
has preserved fragments of cord-woven basketry that generally 
crumbled to pieces in more humid regions. Thus the southern parts 
of Canada jiossess many valuable relics of the distant past; and 
though the northern interior is almost barren, the Arctic and sub- 
Arctic coast-lines, where the floors of the old dwellings remain per- 
petually frozen beneath the surface soil, rival, in the abundance of 
their treasures, the richest sites anywhere in America. 
Craves, though generally less fertile than village or camping 
sites, have in many jdaces yielded valuable remains. INIiich of our 
knowledge of the Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland comes from the 
implements they deposited in caves and rock shelters beside their 
dead. Burial customs, as we have seen, varied greatly in different 
parts of Canada. Wherever cremation was common, as on the 
Pacific coast, or the dead were laid on scaffolds or on the surface of 
the ground, comparatively little has survived. But stone cairns and 
shell-hea]>s often contain both human and other remains, and in 
southeastern Ontario the plough of the farmer lias exposed many pits 
or ossuaries where the Iroquoians had deposited the bones of their 
flead with the tools and utensils that they had used in life. 
The Indians have left other records of their ancient occupation 
in addition to dwelling-places and graves. In British Columbia, and 
more rarely on the prairies, there are ])etrogiyphs or boulders 
sculptured with strange designs about whicli the present natives 
know nothing. Commoner still are pictographs or rock paintings, 
many also prehistoric, altliough some on the upper Fraser river, and 
perhaps elsewhere, were made as late as the nineteenth century. 
Then there are ti’aces of old quarries where the Indians mined their 
soapstone, chert, and other minei'als, old trails over which they 
wandered, stone cairns, food-caches, ami fish-weirs that wer^e con- 
structed before the white man came. Finally, explorers travelling 
in the Arctic archipelago far beyond the historic range of any Eskimo 
tribe now extant have found stone dwellings and tent-rings, graves, 
86959 — 15 .*. 
