The lance or spear, ordinary stick clubs, grooved fending sticks, round fending sticks, flattened and round throwing sticks found may also have been used as weapons.
Disposition of the dead was accomplished by burying with offerings in a flexed or semi-flexed position on the back, or cremated with the burned remains being buried in bags or baskets.
The graves are usually small and quite shallow. Burials are found in caves, midden circles, and open sites—practically any place where digging was easy. Quite often the unburned burials had a “kill hole” pottery bowl placed over the face. Cremation, from all appearances, was practiced earlier and was concurrent to inhumation.
The few skeletal remains found in the natural entrance and Bat Cave section of the Carlsbad Caverns suggest midden type burials or accidental demise, perhaps by falling.
Possibly one of the most interesting and still visible bits of evidence of the Carlsbad Basketmakers are the pictographs or paintings on the south wall of the Cave entrance. These markings are badly weathered, but one can distinguish what appears once to have been a red figure with black up-raised arms of a person, and blobs of red and black which may have been anything.
In other caves over the area have been found other pictographs (paintings) and petroglyphs (pecked) designs. Paints were made from red hematite (red oxide of iron); red and yellow ochers; blue and green from copper carbonates, azurite and malachite; black carbon and white kaolinite.
Occasionally there are found small pebbles with painted designs or lines on them, but their function is unknown.
Jewelry consisted of wooden combs and wooden pin hair ornaments, beads and pendants of white and pink shell, gypsum, black beidellite, turquoise, bone, squash seeds and sections of reeds. Beads were strung on hair cord or yucca fiber cord. Bracelets of Glycimeris shell were worn.
For the most part the shell tells of considerable trade to the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California by our people. Fresh water mussel shells common to the Pecos River were also used for ornaments. Trade was carried on from Mexico into this general region as indicated by the finds of copper bells and macaw parrot feathers from Pueblo ruins in southern New Mexico.
Ceremonial paraphernalia finds are rather rare. Fragments of a golden eagle feather headdress, rattles of gourds, and turtle or tortoise shells, pahos (prayer sticks), wooden wands and wooden painted tablitas (headdresses) have been unearthed in Guadalupe Mountain caves. Closely related to ceremonial purposes, and usually found in close association with the above, are reed cigarettes and whistles, prayer offerings of miniature fending sticks, fiber balls, gaming dice (sticks or counters), as well as possible ceremonial bow sets. As to how the ceremonial objects were used is, naturally, conjecture.