95 
BURIALS 
There is very little archaeological information respecting graves of the 
Algonkian Indians. Only a few have been discovered, mostly in the 
course of ploughing and road and railway construction in Ontario, and 
very little is known about them beyond the fact of their occurrence and 
that they contained no artifacts. It is possible, however, that some of the 
graves containing copper beads, awls, axes, shell ornaments, and in some 
cases powdered hematite or limonite, which are considered to be those of 
mound-building Indians , 1 are really Algonkian. 
Single graves have been discovered at several Neutral sites of the 
archaic period, but it is not known if the bodies had been buried full- 
length or in a flexed position, or if there were accompanying artifacts. Sir 
Francis Knowles excavated an ossuary at a Neutral site of the transitional 
period, which contained many human bones, a cremated burial, a few 
chipped stone artifacts, a cylindrical, hollow bone bead, and a few small 
discoidal shell beads. Single burials seem to be the rule at Neutral sites 
of the late pre-European period, but in a few cases the graves contained a 
pile of leg and other bones, with the skulls piled on top or around them. 
The mortuary customs of the Hurons differed from those of most of 
the earlier Iroquoian peoples in Ontario. They are known to have prac- 
tised scaffold burial, but many single graves are known to occur at their 
village sites, from which the bones were periodically removed and re- 
buried, in some cases as many as a thousand skeletons, in a single pit. 
The ossuaries of the early period do not seem to have contained anything 
besides the bones, but, after the arrival of Europeans, stone and earthen- 
ware pipes, earthenware pots, shell, brass, porcelain, and glass beads, shell 
ornaments, large ocean shells, brass kettles, and iron axes were buried in 
them. Very few ossuaries occur at pre-European sites, the most easterly 
ones being in Durham county, Ontario. 
The early Tionontati appear to have buried their dead in single graves, 
and this seems also to have been the practice at sites of the post-European 
period ; in the latter case, however, the remains were periodically exhumed 
and reburied in ossuaries. Over thirty ossuaries, containing, besides the 
bones, articles of native and European origin, occur in the area known to 
have been occupied by these people. 
Most of the graves at Mohawk-Onondaga sites are single, but oc- 
casionally two and, in a few cases, three, skeletons have been found in the 
same grave. In only one instance was anything buried with the dead. 
There are both single graves and ossuaries at Iroquois sites of the 
post-European period, all containing human bones and associated objects 
similar to those from post-European Huron and Tionontati ossuaries. 
l See Artifacts from Ancient Graves, etc., op. cit. 
