A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 247 pages of information about A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians.

A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 247 pages of information about A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians.
parietal protuberances, rather protuberant occipital, which was not in the least compressed, the well defined supracilliary ridges, and the superior border of the orbits, presenting a quadrilateral outline, were also particularly noticed.  The lower facial bones, including the maxillaries, were wanting.  On consulting such works as are accessible to him, the writer finds no mention of any similar relics having been discovered in mounds in Florida, or elsewhere.  For further particulars reference may be had to a paper on the subject read before the Saint Louis meeting of the American Association, August, 1878.

The discoveries made by Mr. Gillman would seem to indicate that the people whose bones he excavated resorted to a process of partial cremation, some examples of which will be given on another page.  The use of crania as receptacles is certainly remarkable, if not unique.

The fact is well-known to archaeologists that whenever cremation was practiced by Indians it was customary as a rule to throw into the blazing pyre all sorts of articles supposed to be useful to the dead, but no instance is known of such a wholesale destruction of property as occurred when the Indians of Southern Utah burned their dead, for Dr. E. Foreman relates, in the American Naturalist for July, 1876, the account of the exploration of a mound in that Territory, which proves that at the death of a person not only were the remains destroyed by fire, but all articles of personal property, even the very habitation which had served as a home.  After the process was completed, what remained unburned was covered with earth and a mound formed.

A.S.  Tiffany[55] describes what he calls a cremation-furnace, discovered within seven miles of Davenport, Iowa.

* * * Mound seven miles, below the city, a projecting point known as Eagle Point.  The surface was of the usual black soil to the depth of from 6 to 8 inches.  Next was found a burnt indurated clay, resembling in color and texture a medium-burned brick, and about 30 inches in depth.  Immediately beneath this clay was a bed of charred human remains 6 to 18 inches thick.  This rested upon the unchanged and undisturbed loam of the bluffs, which formed the floor of the pit.  Imbedded in this floor of unburned clay were a few very much decomposed, but unburned, human bones.  No implements of any kind were discovered.  The furnace appears to have been constructed by excavating the pit and placing at the bottom of it the bodies or skeletons which had possibly been collected from scaffolds, and placing the fuel among and above the bodies, with a covering of poles or split timbers extending over and resting upon the earth, with the clay covering above, which latter we now find resting upon the charred remains.  The ends of the timber covering, where they were protected by the earth above and below, were reduced to charcoal, parallel pieces of which were found at right angles to
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A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.