CHAPTER XI.
SEPULCHRAL MOUNDS.
SOURCES OF INFORMATION—HILL MOUNDS—THE SCIOTO MOUND—THE TAYLOR MOUND—THE ISSAQUINA MOUND—THE ELLIOT MOUND—THE LOCKPORT MOUND—BLACK BIRD’S GRAVE—SCIOTO VALLEY MOUNDS—SYMBOLICAL RITES—HUMAN SACRIFICES—THE GRAVE CREEK MOUND—COMMON SEPULCHRES—CREMATION—SCIOTO MOUND CRANIUM—SACRED FESTIVALS.
When the significance of the military and sacred enclosures of the Mound-Builders has been fully estimated as memorials of a remarkable people belonging altogether to prehistoric ages of the New World, their sepulchral mounds acquire a new value. In the former we see unmistakable indications of a settled condition of society greatly in advance of anything attained by the Red Indian, and of populous communities devoted to agriculture and other industrial arts. From the latter we may hope to recover some traits of ethnical character; to find in the gifts to the dead illustrations of their arts and customs; and to catch by means of their sepulchral rites some glimpses of the nature of that belief which stimulated the Mound-Builders to the laborious construction of so many sacred earthworks. Their great mounds are for us not merely the sepulchres of an ancient race; they are the cemetery of an early though partial civilisation, from whence we may derive illustrations of the life, manners, and ideas of a people over whose graves the forest had so long resumed its sway, that it seemed to the Red Indians’ supplanters to have been the first occupant of the soil.
Barrows, dunes, moat-hills, cairns, and earth or stone mounds of various kinds, abound in many parts of the Old as well as of the New World, and are nowhere more abundant than in some districts of the British Isles. But although corresponding primitive structures are met with from the Gulf of the St. Lawrence to the Isthmus of Panama, and beyond it, far into the southern continent: nevertheless the works of the Mound-Builders have a character of their own altogether peculiar; and though numbered by thousands, they are limited to well-defined areas, leaving a large portion of the continent, including the whole of the Atlantic sea-board, without any traces of their presence. The Mound-Builders were not a maritime people. Their whole traffic was confined to the great rivers, along the banks of which their ancient traces abound, and to communication by long-obliterated overland routes of travel. Notwithstanding the careful observations which have been put on record relative to the mounds and earthworks of “The West,” much yet remains to be disclosed; for, happily, the excavation of such earth-pyramids is a work greatly too laborious and costly to tempt those who are influenced by mere idle curiosity; while their contents, however valuable to the archæologist, offer no such stimulus to cupidity as, in Mexico and Peru, has led to the destruction of thousands of the memorials of extinct arts and customs.
As a general rule, the earth and stone works appear to have been alike constructed of materials derived from the immediate neighbourhood; so that such differences do not, in the majority of instances, supply any indication of diversity in the enclosed deposits. A special character, however, appears to pertain to one class, designated “Hill Mounds,” from the sites they occupy. Of these Mr. Squier remarks: “The most elevated and commanding positions are frequently crowned with them, suggesting at once the purposes to which some of the mounds or cairns of the ancient Celts were applied: that of signal or alarm posts. It is not unusual to find detached mounds among the hills back from the valleys, and in secluded places, with no other monuments near. The hunter often encounters them in the depths of the forests when least expected: perhaps overlooking some waterfall, or placed in some narrow valley where the foot of man seldom enters.” Similar structures crown many western heights; but some at least are of Indian origin; and our knowledge of the characteristics and contents of those of an earlier race must be greatly extended, before we can assign the true and probably varied objects aimed at in their erection.
But it is to the exploration of one of the smaller hill-mounds that we owe the recovery of the most characteristic illustration of the physical type of the ancient Mound-Builders. The “Scioto Mound Cranium,” described in a later chapter, was obtained from a mound erected on the summit of a commanding height overlooking the valley of the Scioto, with its numerous earthworks. A conical knoll, crowning the hill, rises with such regularity as almost to induce the belief that it is artificial; and on its apex stands the tumulus overshadowed by the trees of the primitive forest. Here under a covering of tough yellow clay, impervious to moisture, a plate of mica rested on an inner cairn, composed chiefly of large rough stones; and within this, a compacted bed of carbonaceous matter contained the skull, with a few bones, and some shells of fresh-water molluscs, disposed irregularly round it. This, therefore, it will be seen, confirms the idea that cremation played an important part in the ancient sepulchral rites.
More recently Professor O. C. Marsh explored the Taylor Mound, another of the hill-mounds, about two and a half miles south of Newark. Apparently a cemetery had been excavated on the summit of the ridge, within which lay the remains of at least eight skeletons, chiefly of women and children, all huddled together, and some of them showing evidence of long exposure. Along with those were found nine lance or arrow-heads of flint, six small axes, one of them made of hematite, and the remainder of diorite or compact greenstone, a small wedge or hatchet of hematite, a flint chisel, a scraper, numerous implements of bone and horn, including needles, a spatula or modeller’s tool, and a whistle made from the tooth of a black bear. Above this ossuary a number of dead had been disposed: some of them evidently interred with care, others as if slaughtered and flung upon the heap of dead; while a mass of incinerated human remains left no doubt on the minds of the explorers that cremation had taken place directly over the dead, and before the regular interment was completed. Hence they were led to the conclusion that the funeral rites had probably included a suttee sacrifice.
Directly under the apex of the mound upwards of one hundred beads of native copper, intermingled with a few shell beads, lay in contact with portions of the cervical vertebræ of a young child, showing that they had been worn as a necklace. The shell beads are about half an inch long, and have been carefully polished. The copper beads are only half this length, and wrought with the hammer out of the native copper; but with so much skill, that in most of them it is difficult to detect the joining. Only two of the skulls were sufficiently preserved to indicate their true form. Both were small, and showed the vertical occiput and large parietal diameter, supposed to pertain to the Mound-Builders, but which are characteristic of many American crania.
The contents of the two hill-mounds are thus seen to differ widely; and so far furnish no clew to any special mode of burial or funeral ceremonies. But the interment of a detached skull, as shown in the Scioto Mound, is no solitary case. I was shown by Mr. L. M. Hosea, of Cincinnati, a large bowl-shaped vessel of steatite, capable of holding about two gallons, discovered by the blowing down of a tree which stood on the summit of a mound on the borders of Lincoln and Casey Counties, Kentucky. It had been inverted over a human skull, beside which lay a number of shell beads, and a quantity of mica. In the same mound was a large conch-shell, hollowed out, and filled with bone implements, including two large, well-finished whistles, several deers’ horn hammers, and about thirty bone pins and awls. A perforated copper plate, and some well-finished stone and flint implements, completed the contents of the mound. Unfortunately the skull was too much decayed to admit of preservation.
I am indebted to Mr. W. Marshall Anderson for some curious disclosures of the contents of another mound recently opened by him at Issaquina, Mississippi. The first remarkable discovery was the exposure of three skeletons disposed vertically, as if they had been buried with their heads above ground. On reaching the natural level, a heap of ashes, with numerous fragments of bone, showed where cremation had taken place. Over this were three skeletons disposed at length, side by side, with a drinking vessel and a wide-mouthed bowl of native pottery close to the head of each. Numerous implements, including tools of copper, well-finished celts of jasper and lignite, and a grotesque clay-pipe representing a human head with dog’s ears, and a frog’s mouth, lay alongside of them. But most noticeable of all was the discovery of two inverted bowls in the centre of the mound, underneath each of which lay a human skull. One of them is described by Mr. Anderson as “a beautiful skull, worthy of a Greek.” But on being exposed to the sun, as they dried, they crumbled to ashes, “literally,” as he says, “disintegrating before my eyes, whilst I was busy gathering up copper and stone implements which would have waited for ever unharmed.”