The Ohio and Erie canal traverses the river-terrace of the Scioto Valley in the vicinity of Chillicothe, where the ancient works of the Mound-Builders are more abundant than in any other area of equal limits hitherto explored. In some cases the canal has been cut through them, and it can scarcely admit of doubt that many interesting traces of the arts and habits of the remarkable people who once filled the long-deserted scene, must have been disclosed to heedless eyes. Here and there, doubtless, a stray relic was picked up, wondered at, and forgotten; but no note was taken of the circumstances under which it was found, and no record made of the discovery. And so must it ever be. The pioneers of civilisation in the uncleared wilds of the West are too entirely preoccupied with the present, to spare a thought for long forgotten centuries. Happily, however, this state of things is passing away, and every year shows increasing evidence of intelligent zeal in the recovery and preservation of whatever is calculated to throw light on the prehistoric ages of America.
The contents of the Scioto Valley Mound, as well as of others described above, prove that the human remains were deposited in them long after the body had gone to decay; and while numerous indications serve to show that cremation was extensively practised by the Mound-Builders, it is not improbable that a custom may have prevailed analogous to the modern Indians’ scaffolding and subsequent sepulture of the bones of their dead. The remains thus periodically gathered were sometimes deposited in a common ossuary, as in that of the Taylor Mound; and in other cases were burnt, with fitting rites, and their ashes heaped together, forming mounds, such as one opened on the bank of Walnut Creek, in the Scioto Valley. The principal portion of this consisted seemingly of long-exposed and highly-compacted ashes, intermingled with specks of charcoal, and small bits of burned bones. Beneath this was a small mound of very pure white clay, resting on the original soil, without any traces of the action of fire, over which the incinerated remains had been piled into a mound, nine feet in height by forty in base. The customs of the North American Indians, however, were very diverse; and among the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians inhumation, cremation, urn-burial, and mummification, accompanied with deposition in artificial vaults and in caves, were all practised. It need not therefore surprise us to find exceptions among the ancient Mound-Builders to any practice recognised as most prevalent among them. Considering the decayed state of most of the bones recovered from the great sepulchral mounds, where they were equally protected from external air and moisture: if the common dead were inhumed under the ordinary little grave-mound, their bones must, for the most part, have long since returned to dust. Nor must it be overlooked that the extremely comminuted state to which most of the skeletons in the larger mounds have been reduced, when brought to light by modern explorers, is due, in part at least, to the falling in of a superincumbent mass of earth and stones upon them, when the timber ceiling of their sarcophagus had sustained the weight long enough only to render them the less able to resist its crushing force. The perfect preservation of the “Scioto Mound cranium” was due to its being imbedded in charcoal, over which a superstructure of large stones enveloped with tough yellow clay had been piled, without any treacherous timber vaults. It lay in the centre of the carbonaceous deposit, resting on its face. The lower jaw was wanting, and only the clavicle, a few cervical vertebræ, and some of the bones of the feet were huddled around it. Unaccompanied though it was by any relics of art, it is, in itself, one of the most valuable objects hitherto recovered from the American mounds.
Such are some of the traces we are able to recover of the sepulchral rites of this people. In discussing the conclusions suggested alike by their disclosures, and by those which the sacrificial mounds, the sacred circumvallations, and the buried works of art reveal, we are dealing with characteristics of a race pertaining to periods long preceding any written history. For us these are their sole chronicles; and yet, even from such data, we are able to deduce some traits of moral and intellectual character. Perhaps the most important fact for our present purpose is the rarity of weapons of war among the sepulchral deposits. It accords with other indications of the condition of the Mound-Builders. They had passed beyond that rude stage of savage life in which war and the chase are the only honourable occupations of man. Their weapons of war, like their fortresses, were means for the defence of acquisitions they had learned to prize more highly. They had conquered the forests, and displaced the spoils of the hunter with the wealth of autumn’s harvestings; and with the habits of a settled agricultural people, many new ideas had taken the place of the wild imaginings and superstitions of the savage. As among all agricultural nations, the vernal and autumnal seasons doubtless had their appropriate festivals; and we can still, in imagination, reanimate their sacred enclosures and avenues with the joyous procession bearing its thank-offering of first-fruits, or laden with the last golden treasures of the harvest-home.
| [87] | Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, p. 171. |
CHAPTER XII.
SACRIFICIAL MOUNDS.
MOUND ALTARS—ALTAR DEPOSITS—QUENCHING THE ALTAR FIRES—MOUND HEARTHS—MOUND CITY—MILITARY ALTAR MOUNDS—THEIR STRUCTURE AND CONTENTS—SIGNIFICANCE OF THEIR DEPOSITS—ANALOGOUS INDIAN RITES—TRANSITIONAL CIVILISATION.
The name of sacrificial mounds has been conferred on a class of monuments peculiar to the New World, and highly illustrative of the rites and customs of the ancient race of the mounds. From their contents also we derive many of the most interesting examples of the arts of that singular people. The most noticeable characteristics of the sacrificial mounds are: their almost invariable occurrence within enclosures; their regular construction in uniform layers of gravel, earth, and sand, disposed alternately in strata conformable to the shape of the mound; and their covering a symmetrical hearth or altar of burnt clay or stone, on which are deposited numerous relics, in all instances exhibiting traces, more or less abundant, of their having been exposed to the action of fire.
A sufficient number of sacrificial mounds has been opened to justify the adoption of certain general conclusions relative to their construction and the purposes for which they were designed. On the natural surface of the ground, in most cases, a basin of fine clay appears to have been modelled with care, in a perfectly symmetrical form, but varying in shape, and still more in dimensions. They have been found square, round, elliptical, and in the form of parallelograms; and, in size, range from a diameter of two feet, to fifty or sixty feet long, and twelve or fifteen feet wide. The most common dimensions, however, are from five to eight feet in diameter. The clay basin, or “altar,” as it has been designated, invariably exhibits traces of having been subjected to the action of fire, and frequently of intense and long-continued or oft-repeated heat. It is, moreover, evident that in some cases it had not only been often used; but, after being destroyed by repeated exposures to intense heat, it had been several times remodelled before it was finally covered over by the superincumbent mound.
Within the focus or basin of the altars are found numerous relics: elaborate carvings in stone, ornaments cut in mica, copper implements, disks, and tubes, pearl, shell, and silver beads, and various other objects, hereafter referred to, but all more or less injured by fire. In some cases the carved pipes and other works in stone have been split and calcined by the heat, and the copper relics have been melted, so that the metal lies fused in shapeless masses in the centre of the basin. Traces of cloth completely carbonised, but still retaining the structure of the doubled and twisted thread; ivory or bone needles, and other objects destructible by fire, have also been observed; and the whole are invariably found intermixed with a quantity of ashes. Large accumulations of calcined bones, including fragments of human bones, also lay above some of the deposits, or mingled with them; and in other cases a mass of calcined shells, or of fine carbonaceous dust, like that formed by the burning of vegetable matter, filled up the entire hollow. But while it is obvious from a few traces, that the deposits on the altars had included offerings of objects which yielded at once to the destructive element to which they were there exposed, as well as others capable in some degree of withstanding the intensity of the flame: there are only faint traces of all but the least destructible relics of stone or metal. In one mound portions of the contents were cemented together by a tufa-like substance of a grey colour, resembling the scoriæ of a furnace, and of great hardness. But subsequent analyses demonstrated that it was made up in part of phosphates; and a single fragment of partially calcined bone found on the altar was the patella of a human skeleton. The long-continued, and probably oft-repeated application of intense heat had reduced the cemented mass to this condition. A quantity of pottery, many implements of copper, and a large number of spear-heads chipped out of quartz and manganese garnet, were also deposited on the hearth; but they were intermixed with much coal and ashes, and were all more or less melted or broken up with the intense action of the fire. Out of a bushel or two of fragments of the spear-heads, and of from fifty to a hundred quartz arrow-heads, only four specimens were recovered entire. Scattered over the deposits of earth filling one of the compartments, were traces of a number of pieces of timber, four or five feet long, supposed by the explorers to have supported a funeral or sacrificial pile. They had been somewhat burned, and the carbonised surface preserved their casts in the hard earth, although the wood had entirely decayed. They had been heaped over while glowing, for the earth around them was slightly baked; and thus, after repeated, and perhaps long-protracted sacrificial rites, some grand final service had consummated the religious mysteries; and the blazing altar was quenched by means of the tumulus that was to preserve it for the instruction of future ages.