Temple-Mound—Marietta, Ohio.
At Marietta, Ohio, are four mounds like that shown in the cut, within a square enclosure. The height of this one is ten feet. The mound at Seltzerton, Mississippi, forty feet in height, covers nearly six acres, and has a summit area of four acres, on which are two conical mounds, also forty feet high and thirty feet in diameter. The base is surrounded with a ditch ten feet deep, an unusual feature. There are said to be large adobe blocks in the northern slope of this pyramid, and the same material is reported in other southern structures. These reports require additional confirmation.
The Messier Mound, in Early County, Georgia, differs in its location from most temple-mounds, standing on the summit of a natural hill which overlooks a broad extent of country. The artificial height is fifty-five feet, and the summit area sixty-six by one hundred and fifty-six feet. There are no traces of any means of ascent, and the slopes are very steep. A ditch extends in a semicircle from corner to corner at the southern end, and thence down the slope of the hill. An excavation of two acres, twenty-five feet deep on an average, seems to have furnished the earth for the mound. A round well, sixty feet in diameter and forty feet deep is found at one end of the excavation. A temple-mound in the Nacooche Valley, Georgia, is elliptical in form, and has a summit area of sixty by ninety feet.
An octagonal mound, forty-five feet high and one hundred and eighty feet in diameter at the top, is located on a hill-top opposite the city of Macon; it was formed of earth carried from the valley below. A temple-mound at Mason's Plantation, on the Savannah River, has been partly washed away by the water, which reveals along the natural surface of the ground a stratum a foot thick of charcoal, baked earth, ashes, broken pottery, shells, and bones of animals and birds, with a few human bones. The mound, which is of the surrounding alluvial soil, would seem to have been erected over a spot long occupied as an encampment. This mound, and another near it, were originally enclosed by a moat which communicated with the river, and widened on one side into a broad lagoon.
On Plunkett Creek, Georgia, is a mound of stones which has the appearance of a temple-mound, having a summit area forty feet in diameter. Stone is rarely used in structures of this class; perhaps this was originally a conical mound. There seem to be few large mounds in the south unaccompanied by ditches, which seem here to have been introduced where embankments would have been preferred in the north.
In a late number of the Cincinnati Quarterly Journal of Science I find described, unfortunately only on newspaper authority, a remarkable temple-mound, near Springfield, Missouri, on a hill three hundred feet high. It is of earth and stones, sixty two feet high, five hundred feet in diameter at the base and one hundred and thirty at the summit. A ditch, two hundred feet wide and five feet deep, surrounds the base, and is crossed by a causeway, opposite which a stairway of roughly hewn stones leads up the northern slope. The top is covered by a platform of stone, in the centre of which lies a stone ten by twelve feet, and eleven inches thick, hollowed in the middle. This report without further confirmation must be considered a hoax—at least so far as the stone steps, pavement, and altar are concerned.
