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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Burial Mounds in the North (Illustrated),' Cyrus Thomas delves into the archaeological significance of ancient burial mounds in the northern regions of America. Thomas meticulously examines the construction, contents, and cultural implications of these intriguing structures, providing a thorough analysis of their historical context. With detailed illustrations accompanying the text, readers are able to visualize the findings and better understand the author's scholarly insights. Thomas' writing style is both informative and engaging, making this book a valuable resource for anyone interested in archaeology and Native American history. The book is a testament to Thomas' expertise in the field, as well as his dedication to preserving and sharing the stories of ancient civilizations. 'Burial Mounds in the North (Illustrated)' is a must-read for those who seek to deepen their understanding of the rich cultural heritage of North America. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Burial Mounds in the North
(Illustrated)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
Between legend and loam, this study asks how piles of earth become evidence of people, practices, and time. In Burial Mounds in the North (Illustrated), Cyrus Thomas turns familiar rises in the landscape into a record that can be read, measured, and carefully compared. The work’s driving question is not merely what these mounds contain, but how to approach them without importing fantasies that obscure the communities that raised them. What follows is an inquiry committed to procedure: observe, document, test, and revise. Its drama lies in replacing speculation with patient description, revealing how careful method can coax durable knowledge from soil.
This is a work of archaeological and ethnological nonfiction focused on the northern United States, produced in the late nineteenth-century milieu of American field investigation. Cyrus Thomas, an American ethnologist associated with the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, helped shape that era’s systematic study of earthworks through surveys, excavations, and comparative analysis. The “Illustrated” presentation underscores its documentary character, pairing prose with measured figures that translate ground into geometry. Without dramatization, the book proceeds site by site, section by section, from observable form toward cautious inference. Its setting is not a single locale but a dispersed corridor of river valleys, plains, and woodlands.
Readers encounter a careful catalog of burial mounds, their shapes, dimensions, construction techniques, and contents as recorded in situ. Thomas’s voice is methodical and unhurried, privileging measurements, stratigraphic notes, and cautious comparisons over sweeping claims. The illustrations serve as a parallel argument, inviting one to weigh profiles and plans alongside narrative summaries. Rather than a single continuous storyline, the book offers a mosaic of cases that gradually clarifies recurring features and meaningful departures. The tone is analytic, at times dry by design, but attentive to detail, so that patterns emerge not from assertion but accumulation and cross-checking.
A central theme is the displacement of myth by method, where conjectures about mysterious builders give way to conclusions supported by observable facts. Equally important is Thomas’s attention to variation: similar forms recur, yet local choices in placement, construction, and ceremony resist a single, flattening explanation. The book explores what mortuary architecture can reveal about social organization, belief, and exchange without overstepping the limits of the record. It also models the value—and the limits—of classification, tracing types and distributions while acknowledging that classifications are tools, not truths. Throughout, evidence is made to speak through accumulation rather than rhetoric.
For contemporary readers, the book matters as a landmark in the development of archaeological practice in North America and as a document within the history of ideas about Indigenous pasts. It shows how publicly supported research programs could replace rumor with replicable procedures, a lesson still vital wherever cultural heritage is politicized. Reading it today invites reflection on how claims are built, checked, and revised, and on the responsibilities researchers bear when interpreting ancestral sites. The materials and drawings remain a usable archive, while the work’s restraint offers a counterexample to sensationalism that continues to distort conversations about antiquity.
The reading experience is immersive in its specificity, with sequences of measurements, inventories, and sectional views that reward steady attention. Thomas writes in the conventions of his time, so some terminology and interpretive frameworks reflect nineteenth-century scholarship; approaching them with historical awareness deepens rather than diminishes the value of the record he preserved. The illustrations anchor the prose, allowing readers to visualize construction sequences and burial placements without relying on imagination alone. Engaging with the book thus becomes a dialogue between text and image, in which skepticism is invited and evidence can be revisited, compared, and, where necessary, reconsidered.
Above all, Burial Mounds in the North (Illustrated) situates earthworks within an accountable practice of looking, one that honors complexity while resisting the urge to fill gaps with fables. Its steady accumulation of verifiable detail invites present-day readers to see landscape as archive and to treat interpretation as a provisional craft. As debates continue over preservation, repatriation, and the rightful narration of Indigenous histories, Thomas’s procedural rigor remains instructive, even as we read him critically. The book endures because it models how patient observation can reframe inherited questions—and because it asks us to approach the past with humility.
Synopsis
Burial Mounds in the North (Illustrated) by Cyrus Thomas presents a systematic account of earthen tumuli across the northern United States, written to clarify their construction, distribution, and purpose. Responding to longstanding debate over who built the mounds and why, Thomas organizes observations into a coherent narrative grounded in fieldwork and documentation. The volume emphasizes careful description over conjecture, pairing concise analyses with maps, plans, and cross-sectional diagrams that anchor claims in observed facts. Opening chapters define the scope, outline prior theories, and set standards for measurement and terminology so that varied reports can be compared and synthesized without confusion.
Thomas details methods that privilege verifiable evidence: surveying mound groups, recording dimensions and orientations, and noting stratigraphic layers, soil types, and signs of disturbance. He integrates firsthand excavations with earlier notices, correspondence from local investigators, and museum holdings to assemble a broad sample. The argument proceeds by typology and context rather than isolated marvels, showing how recurring features reveal construction habits and mortuary customs. Throughout, he flags uncertainties, differentiating original features from later intrusions or looting. The book’s illustrations serve as technical records, translating earthworks into standardized profiles and plans that allow reliable comparisons within and between regions.
With methods established, the study sketches the geographic spread of burial mounds across river terraces, lakeshores, and upland ridges, noting how placement relates to water, visibility, and nearby habitation debris. Thomas distinguishes solitary mounds from clustered cemeteries and links groups through alignments and shared forms. He describes variations in size, base shape, and summit treatment, and he documents differences in construction, from layered earthen deposits to partial stone settings where local materials dictated technique. The narrative underscores how later agriculture, erosion, and reuse complicate readings, requiring cautious interpretation when profiles are truncated or when artifacts have been displaced.
Turning to mortuary evidence, Thomas catalogues burial modes encountered in northern mounds, including interments in log-lined or stone-lined features, bundle burials, cremated remains, and extended or flexed inhumations. He relates these to mound stratigraphy, showing how placement and covering stages reflect repeated use. Accompanying objects—ceramics, shell ornaments, copper items, lithic tools, pendants, and carved items—are considered for what they imply about craft, exchange, and status without overreaching. The text distinguishes primary deposits from intrusive later burials, cautioning that mixed assemblages can mislead. Illustrations of sections and artifact groups reinforce how context determines the weight given to any single find.
Comparative analysis occupies a central place in the argument. Thomas contrasts recurring patterns within northern material with those known from adjacent regions, using shared techniques and artifact suites to test cultural relationships. He evaluates claims of exotic origins by measuring them against demonstrable continuities in local practice and ethnographic accounts of Indigenous mortuary customs. Rather than assigning all mounds to a single people, he traces regional variability and temporal layering, urging that classification grow from observed regularities. The discussion steadily narrows speculative possibilities, emphasizing explanations supported by construction methods, settlement associations, and the distribution of distinctive tools and ornaments.
Having weighed forms, contexts, and associations, the study addresses broader social inferences cautiously. Thomas uses mound size variation, labor investment, and evidence of repeated ceremonies to sketch ranges of community organization without asserting uniform hierarchies. He correlates cemetery layouts with nearby habitation traces to propose how mortuary spaces related to daily life and territorial markers. Differences between elaborate centers and modest localities are presented as a spectrum rather than a stark divide. Throughout, the text models how cumulative, modest deductions—rather than single dramatic discoveries—can reveal historical processes shaping northern mound-building traditions across multiple generations.
The work closes by situating northern burial mounds within a coherent archaeological picture that privileges continuity, regional diversity, and empirical rigor. Its enduring contribution lies in replacing conjectural narratives with testable descriptions and in demonstrating how illustrations, standardized records, and careful context control produce reliable insight. By bringing disparate reports into a consistent framework, Thomas offers a foundation for future research, conservation, and respectful engagement with descendant communities. The book’s measured approach continues to resonate, not for a sensational revelation, but for its disciplined method and its insistence that the past be reconstructed from evidence that can be seen, compared, and verified.
Historical Context
Burial Mounds in the North (Illustrated) by Cyrus Thomas emerges from the late nineteenth-century American effort to systematize knowledge of Indigenous antiquities. In the 1880s and early 1890s, the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology (founded 1879, directed by John Wesley Powell) organized nationwide fieldwork on earthen monuments. Cyrus Thomas (1825–1910), an ethnologist who had earlier worked in natural history, led the Division of Mound Exploration. His charge was to document, excavate, and interpret mounds across the United States, especially as settlement and agriculture were rapidly destroying sites. The volume’s maps, profiles, and plates embody the Bureau’s aim to present verifiable, measured data.
Thomas wrote into a debate shaped by the so-called Mound Builder controversy. Since the early nineteenth century, many Euro-American writers had attributed North American mounds to a vanished Old World–derived race, rather than to Native peoples. The first major scholarly survey, Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 1848), cataloged hundreds of Ohio Valley earthworks and helped frame key questions, even as speculation persisted. By the 1870s, popular histories still credited Phoenicians, Celts, or Israelites. Thomas’s work explicitly tested such claims against stratigraphic observations, artifact typology, and historical documentation.
Under Powell, the Bureau secured federal appropriations in the early 1880s to investigate mounds systematically. Thomas organized field parties and local correspondents, producing standardized surveys, trench profiles, and artifact catalogs. Agents such as Philetus W. Norris, J. W. Emmert, and Gerard Fowke excavated sites across multiple states and forwarded notes, sketches, and collections to Washington. The results appeared in BAE Annual Reports, culminating in Thomas’s 1894 Report on the Mound Explorations, which synthesized thousands of site records. That institutional framework—federal funding, centralized archiving, and peer review—shaped the research reflected in Burial Mounds in the North and its reliance on measured illustration.
The book’s northern emphasis aligns with prominent mound regions around the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi. Earlier, Increase A. Lapham’s The Antiquities of Wisconsin (1855) had documented effigy and conical mounds in Wisconsin, setting a descriptive standard. Thomas and his agents extended such coverage to Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, and parts of New York. Many northern burial mounds belong to what archaeology now terms the Woodland period (approximately 1000 BCE to 1000 CE), characterized by conical tombs, log-lined graves, and grave goods of copper, shell, and stone. Thomas compared these features regionally rather than attributing them to a separate “race.”
Illustration served as argument. The Bureau’s reports reproduced site plans, elevations, and excavation sections as wood engravings and lithographic plates prepared from field measurements. Thomas emphasized mound construction sequences, burial positions, and associations of artifacts—such as copper implements from the Lake Superior region, shell ornaments, and pipes—using drawings to show context rather than isolated curiosities. He correlated soil layers, intrusive burials, and re-use episodes to demonstrate long occupation histories. That visual and stratigraphic evidence underpinned his central claim: the mounds’ builders were ancestors of Indigenous nations known from historic records, not an extinct, non–Native American civilization.
The investigations unfolded amid rapid transformation of the American interior. Railroads, lumbering, and agriculture were leveling mounds, while museums and private collectors created intense demand for antiquities. Federal Indian policy—the Dawes Act (1887), reservation allotment, and boarding schools—framed Native peoples as “vanishing,” spurring salvage ethnography within the Bureau. No national antiquities law yet existed; the Antiquities Act would not be enacted until 1906. Thomas’s urgency to survey and publish northern burial mounds reflected this climate: documentation was a race against ongoing destruction, and the Smithsonian sought to substitute measured records for rumor and commercial collecting.
Thomas’s conclusions rested on converging lines of evidence. He cited early European accounts of mound and ossuary use, noted continued mound construction into the colonial era in parts of the Southeast (for example among the Natchez), and traced continuities in artifact forms and mortuary customs. For northern regions, he compared ethnographic reports on Algonquian- and Siouan-speaking peoples with excavated materials, arguing for Indigenous authorship without positing a uniform culture. By assembling county-by-county inventories and critiquing unfounded claims, he dismantled the “lost race” hypothesis and redirected attention to regional diversity and historical connections among Native communities.
Burial Mounds in the North thus reflects the emergence of professional archaeology in the United States and a decisive shift from speculation to empirical synthesis. It participates in a broader Smithsonian project to classify, map, and historicize Indigenous material culture, while exposing the racial assumptions embedded in popular narratives. The work is also a product of its time: excavation practices were intrusive, and typologies were still nascent. Yet by insisting on data, illustrations, and historical corroboration, Thomas offered a durable critique of the Mound Builder myth and laid foundations for later, more nuanced understandings of northern mound traditions.
Burial Mounds in the North (Illustrated)
Introductory
All the works of the mound-builders of our country are exceedingly interesting to the antiquarian and are valuable as illustrating the habits, customs, and condition of the people by whom they were formed, but the sepulchral tumuli surpass all others in importance in this respect. Although usually simple in form and conveying thereby no indications of the characteristics of the people by whom they were erected, yet when explored they reveal to us, by their internal structure and contents, more in regard to the habits, beliefs, and art of their authors than can be learned from all their other works combined. From them we are enabled to learn some traits of ethnical character. The gifts to, or property of, their dead deposited in these sepulchers illustrate their arts and customs and cast some rays of light into their homes and daily life, and the regard for their dead indicated by the remaining evidences of their modes of burial and sepulchral rites affords some glimpses of their religious beliefs and superstitions. The larger and more imposing works, as the pyramidal mounds, the enclosures, canals, etc., furnish indications of their character, condition, strength, and culture-status as a people or tribe, but the burial mounds and their contents, besides the evidences they furnish in regard to the religious belief and art of the builders, tell us something of individual traits, something of their social life, their tastes, their personal regard for each other, and even something of the diseases to which they were subject. What is still more important, the modes of burial and vestiges of art found with the dead furnish us undoubted evidences of tribal distinctions among the authors of these works, and, together with the differences in external form, enable us to determine in a general way the respective areas occupied by the different tribes or peoples during the mound-building age.
Judging by all the data so far obtained relating to the form, internal structure, and contents of these works, much of which has not yet been published, we are perhaps warranted in concluding that the following districts or areas were occupied by different peoples or tribes. As a matter of course we can only designate these areas in general terms.
(1) The Wisconsin district, or area of the emblematic or effigy mounds. This embraces the southern half of Wisconsin, a small portion of the northern part of Illinois, and the extreme northeast corner of Iowa. The effigy or animal mounds form the distinguishing feature of the works of this district, but aside from these there are other features sufficient to separate the works of this section from those further south.
(2) The Illinois or Upper Mississippi district, embracing eastern Iowa, northeastern Missouri, and northern and central Illinois, as far south as the mouth of the Illinois River.
In this region the works are mostly simple conical tumuli of small or moderate size, found on the uplands, ridges, and bluffs as well as on the bottoms, and were evidently intended chiefly as depositories of the dead. They are further characterized by internal rude stone and wooden vaults or layers; by the scarcity of pottery vessels, the frequent occurrence of pipes, the presence of copper axes, and often a hard, mortar-like layer over the primary or original burial. The skeletons found are usually extended, though frequently in a sitting or squatting posture.
Walls and enclosures are of rare occurrence in this region[1q].
(3) The Ohio district, including the State of Ohio, the western part of West Virginia, and the eastern portion of Indiana. Although the works of this region present some features which are common to those of the Gulf section, there are several peculiar characteristics which warrant us in designating it as a distinct district. Among other of these peculiar features we notice the great circles and squares of the enclosures, the long parallel lines of earthen walls, the so-called "altar mounds," or mounds containing structures chiefly of clay to which the name "altar" has been applied; the numerous carved stone pipes; the character of the pottery and the methods of burial.
(4) The New York district, confined chiefly to the northern and western parts of the State of New York, but including also the lake region of the central portion.
As the antiquities of this district have been shown by Squier to be chiefly due to the Indian tribes occupying that section at the time of its discovery by the Europeans, it is unnecessary to note the distinguishing characteristics. The works are chiefly enclosing walls, remains of palisades, and burial mounds.
(5) The Appalachian district, including western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and part of southeastern Kentucky.
The characteristics which appear to warrant us in concluding that the works of this region pertain to a different people from those in the other districts, at the same time seem to show some relation to those of the Ohio district. Such are the numerous stone pipes, the altar-like structures found in some of the mounds, and the presence of mica plates with the skeletons. But the peculiar features are the mode of burial, the absence of pottery, and the numerous polished celts and engraved shells found in the mounds.
Although it is probable that there are at least three districts in the southern portion of the United States, they appear to pass from one into the other by such slight changes in the character of the works as to render it exceedingly difficult to fix the boundaries between them. I therefore mention the following, provisionally, as being those indicated by the data so far obtained.
(6) The Middle Mississippi area or Tennessee district, including southeast Missouri, northern Arkansas, middle and western Tennessee, southern and western Kentucky, and southern Illinois. The works of the Wabash valley possibly belong also to this district, but the data obtained in regard to them are not sufficient to decide this point satisfactorily. This district, like the others of the south, is distinguished from the northern section by its larger mounds, many of which are pyramidal and truncated and often terraced, and which were, beyond question, used as domiciliary mounds. Here we also meet with repeated examples of enclosures though essentially different from those of Ohio; also ditches and canals. From the Lower Mississippi and Gulf districts, with which, as we have said, it is closely allied, it is distinguished chiefly by the presence of the box-shaped stone cists or coffins, by the small circular house-sites or hut-rings, and by the character of the pottery. This is pre-eminently the pottery region, the typical forms being the long-necked, gourd-shaped vase and the image-vessels. In this district the carved stone pipes are much less common than in the Illinois, Ohio, and Appalachian districts.
(7) The Lower Mississippi district, including the southern half of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. There are no marked characteristics by which to distinguish it from the Middle district; in fact as we move southward along the Mississippi from the mouth of the Illinois river, the works and their contents indicate a succession of tribes differing but slightly in habits, customs, and modes of life, the river generally forming one natural boundary between them, but the other boundaries being arbitrary. For example, the Cahokia region appears to have been the home of a tribe from which at one time a colony pushed northward and settled for a while in Brown and Pike Counties, Illinois. The extreme southeastern counties of Missouri were probably the seat of another populous tribe which extended its borders into the western part of southern Illinois and slightly into northeast Arkansas, and closely resembled in customs and art the ancient people who occupied that part of the Cumberland valley in middle Tennessee. This subsection is principally distinguished by the presence of the small circular house-sites, which are slightly basin-shaped, with a low ring of earth around them. As we move farther southward into Arkansas the house-sites change into low circular mounds, usually from 1 to 3 feet in height, and in nearly every instance containing a layer of clay (often burned) and ashes.
These small mounds, which are clearly shown to have been house-sites, were also burial places. It appears to have been a very common custom in this section to bury the dead in the floor, burn the dwelling over them, and cover the whole with dirt, the last operation often taking place while the embers were yet smouldering. Burial in graves was also practiced to a considerable extent. As we approach the Arkansas River, moving southward and from thence into Louisiana, the pottery shows a decided improvement in character and ornamentation.
(8) The Gulf district, including the Gulf States east of the Mississippi. The works of this section appear to be closely allied to those of the Lower Mississippi district, as here we also find the large flat-topped pyramidal mounds, enclosing walls, and surrounding ditches and canals.
The chief differences are to be found in the forms and ornamentation of the pottery and modes of burial.
As we approach the Mississippi River the distinguishing features gradually disappear, although there appears to be a distinct subdistrict in the northern part of Mississippi, and as we enter the Florida peninsula a change is observed which appears to indicate a different people, but the data so far obtained are not sufficient to enable us to outline the subdistricts.
This districting is to be regarded as a working hypothesis rather than as a settled conclusion which will stand the test of future investigations. It is more than likely that other subdivisions will be found necessary, and that the boundaries of some of the districts given will have to be more or less modified; still, I believe the arrangement will be found substantially correct.
As a very general and almost universal rule, mounds of the class under consideration are more or less conical in form, and are common to all sections where earthworks are known to exist, in fact they form almost the only ancient remains of some localities. Often they are isolated, with no other monuments near them, but more frequently they occur in groups or are associated with other works. Squier and Davis[1] say "they are generally of considerable size, varying from 6 to 80 feet in height, but having an average of from 15 to 25 feet."1
This is probably true in regard to the mounds explored by these archaeologists in Ohio, but is erroneous if applied generally; as very many, evidently used and intended as burying places only, are but two or three feet high, and so far as the more recent examinations made in other sections—especially the explorations carried on under the Bureau of Ethnology—have shown, tumuli of this character are usually from 3 to 10 feet high, though some, it is true, are of much larger dimensions; but these are the exceptions and not the rule.2
As the authors just alluded to are so frequently referred to by writers, and their statements in reference to the works explored by them are taken as of general application, I will venture to correct another statement made by them in regard to mounds of this character. They assert that "these mounds invariably cover a single skeleton (in very rare instances more than one, as in the case of the Grave Creek mound), which, at the time of its interment, was enveloped in bark or coarse matting or enclosed in a rude sarcophagus of timber, the traces, in some instances the very casts, of which remain. Occasionally the chamber of the dead is built of stone rudely laid up, without cement of any kind."3
I have investigated but few of the ancient works of Ohio personally, or through the assistants of the Bureau, hence I can only speak in regard to them from what has been published and from communications received, but judging from these, Messrs. Squier and Davis, while no doubt correctly describing the mounds explored by them, have been too hasty in drawing general conclusions.
That burial mounds in the northern sections very frequently cover but a single skeleton is true, but that this, even in this section, is universally true or that it is the general rule is a mistake, as will appear from what is shown hereafter. Nor will it apply as a rule to those of the southern sections.
To illustrate the character and construction of these mounds, and modes of burial in them, I will introduce here brief descriptions of the leading types found in the different northern districts heretofore mentioned, confining myself chiefly to the explorations made by the Bureau assistants.
Burial Mounds of the Wisconsin District
Following the order of the geographical districts heretofore given, we commence with the Wisconsin section, or region of the effigy mounds.
As a general rule the burial mounds in this area are comparatively small, seldom exceeding 10 feet in height and generally ranging from 3 to 6 feet. In all cases these belong to that class of works usually denominated "simple conical tumuli[2]."
Of the methods of construction and modes of burial there appear to be some two or three types, though not so different as necessarily to indicate different tribes or peoples. One of these is well represented in the following extract from Dr. I. A. Lapham's work describing some mounds opened by Dr. Hoy, near Racine:
We excavated fourteen of the mounds, some with the greatest possible care. They are all sepulchral, of a uniform construction as represented in Fig. 1 [our Fig. 1.] Most of them contained more than one skeleton; in one instance we found no less than seven. We could detect no appearance of stratification, each mound having been built at one time and not by successive additions. During the investigations we obtained sufficient evidence to warrant me in the following conclusions. The bodies were regularly buried in a sitting or partly kneeling posture facing the east, with the legs placed under them. They were covered with a bark or log roofing over which the mound was built.4
Fig. 1. —Section of mound near Racine, Wisconsin.
In these a basin-shaped excavation some 2 or 3 feet deep was first made in the soil in which the bodies were deposited, as shown in Fig. 1.
Mr. Middleton, one of the Bureau assistants, in 1883, opened quite a number of small burial mounds in Crawford and Vernon counties, belonging to the same type as those just described; some with the excavation in the original soil in which the skeletons were deposited, though in others there were no such excavations, the skeletons being deposited on the original surface or at various depths in the mounds. I give here descriptions of a few of them from his notes:
Fig. 2. —Section of burial mound, Vernon County, Wisconsin.
The one numbered 16, of the Courtois group, is about 20 feet in diameter, and at present scarcely more than 1 foot high, the ground having been in cultivation for several years and the mound considerably lowered by the plow. A vertical section is given in Fig. 2, a a, indicating the natural surface of the ground, b the part of the mound removed, and c the original circular excavation in the natural soil to the depth of 2 feet.
Four skeletons were found in this excavation, two side by side near the center, with heads south, faces up, one near the north margin with head west, and the other on the south side with head east, all stretched at full length.
In another mound of the same group with a similar excavation nothing save a single skull was found. In another of exactly the same kind some of the skeletons were folded, while others were extended at full length.
In all these cases, and in a majority of the small burial mounds opened in this western part of the State, there was no stratification; still there were found some exceptions to this rule.
Vestiges of art were comparatively rare in them, yet here and there were found an arrow-point, a chipped flint scraper or celt—in some instances remarkably fine specimens—a few large copper gorgets, evidently hammered from native copper, copper beads, etc. Very few vessels of pottery were obtained from them, but one was discovered, shown in Fig. 3, which I believe is of the finest quality of this ware so far obtained from the mounds of the United States. There were intrusive burials in a few of these mounds, but these have been wholly omitted from consideration in the descriptions given.
In a few instances the mounds seem to have been built solely for the purpose of covering a confused mass of human bones gathered together after the flesh had disappeared or had been removed. Similar mounds are described by Mr. Thomas Armstrong as found near Ripon, Fond du Lac County. Speaking of these, Mr. Armstrong says:
As to how these bones came to be placed in these mounds, we can of course only conjecture; but from their want of arrangement, from the lack of ornaments and implements, and from their having been placed on the original surface, we are inclined to believe that the dry bones were gathered together—those in the large mounds first and those in the smaller ones afterwards—and placed in loose piles on the ground and the earth heaped over them until the mounds were formed.5
There can be no doubt that the bones in this case were gathered up from other temporary burial places or depositories, as was the custom of several tribes of Indians.
Fig. 3. —Earthen pot from Wisconsin mound.
A number of burial mounds opened by Mr. W. G. Anderson, near Madison, were found to be of the same general type as those mentioned by Mr. Middleton. These he describes as being very low and poorly made. Eight were opened, all having been built in the same way, with only one layer of black earth, so hard as to make the work of excavation exceedingly laborious. These were circular, and about 4 feet high. Skeletons were found as near as 12 or 13 inches to the surface, but badly decayed. There were no sarcophagi or coffins, and in all cases the heads pointed towards the west.6
In some instances the mound contained a circular stone wall, within which a pit had been dug to the depth of 2 or 3 feet in the original soil, as, for example, the one near Waukesha, described by Dr. Lapham.7
A mound in Crawford County, opened by Colonel Norris, one of the Bureau assistants, in 1882, shows a similar vault or pit, but differs from the preceding in being distinctly stratified and wanting the stone wall. The construction of this tumulus and the mode of burial in it were as follows:
Fig. 4. —Section of burial mound, Crawford County, Wisconsin.
Proceeding from the top downwards, there was first a layer of soil and sand about 1 foot thick; next, nearly 2 feet in depth of calcined human bones, without order, mingled with which were charcoal, ashes, and a reddish-brown mortar-like substance, burned as hard as pavement brick. This layer is numbered 4 in the annexed cut (Fig. 4), which represents a vertical section of the mound. Immediately below this was a layer about 1 foot thick (No. 3) of clay or mortar mixed with sand, burned to a brick-red color. Below this, in the space marked 2 in the cut, were found the bones of fifteen or twenty individuals, in a confused heap, without order or arrangement. Mingled with these were firebrands, charcoal, and ashes. The bones were charred, some of them to charcoal, and some were glazed with melted sand. The mass appears to have been first covered with soft clay-mortar, which ran into and filled the spaces, and the burning to have been done afterwards by means of brush or wood heaped on the top, as among the bones were lumps of hard burned clay.
The bottom of this layer corresponded with the original surface of the ground, but the excavation being continued, a circular vault or pit, 6 feet in diameter, was found extending downwards, with perpendicular sides, to the depth of nearly 3 feet. The bottom of this pit was covered to the depth of an inch with fine chocolate-colored dust. Although the filling of this pit was chiefly sand, there was a cavity at the bottom a foot high in the center, over which the sand filling was arched as shown in the figure.
It is evident that the skeletons in this mound were buried after the flesh had been removed, as we can on no other supposition explain the fact that the clay or mortar had filled the interstices between the bones, and that in some cases it had even penetrated into the skulls.
Another mound, opened by Colonel Norris in the same neighborhood, presented some peculiarities worthy of notice, although not sufficient to mark it as belonging to a distinct type.
Fig. 5. —Section of burial mound, Crawford County, Wisconsin.
