Mound Builders

It was a curious skull that some grave-openers in Ohio stood gazing upon last week. It bore a copper nose, supplied by a mortician who evidently knew that cartilage decays and that one would not want to enter the courts of Heaven without full facial equipment. It had a copper helmet, intricately carved and fitted with copper rods a foot long for the dead man's elaborate coiffure, long since returned to dust.

Scattered in heaps within the skeleton's ribs, arranged in lines beneath the thorax and shoulders as though dropped from decayed strings, lay quarts and quarts of finest pierced pearls, from pinhead size to hickory-nut. There were necklaces of grizzly bears' teeth, the largest ever found, strung with buttons of copper and silver. There were tortoise shell fragments and a swan cut in tortoise shell and effigy pipes--one, in the image of a standing wolf, beautifully cut; another, a foot in length and highly polished, showing a bear. There were cloths, folded beneath the grisly one's vacant pate and beneath the heads of three companions who lay beside him on the scaffold in that charnel house. Woven in patterns of concentric circles of different colors, these textures had to be sketched quickly before their 2,000-year-old fibres crumbled in the warm outer air.

The scene was the western tip of the Seip Mound, near Bainbridge, Ohio. The diggers, Curator Harry C. Shetrone and Director C. W. Mills of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society (Columbus), and Archaeologist Gerard Fowke, of Maysville, Ky. The remains seemed to be those of royal personages among the ancient Mound Builders--a late Stone Age race that threw, up its totemic burial tumuli from the Rockies to the Atlantic and the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Seip Mound, regular in shape* (240 by 160 by 28 ft. high), is a large one and when fair weather permits further excavations next summer, should yield treasures comparable to Egypt's Valley of the Kings in archaeological interest. The chief importance of last week's discoveries: 1) Cloths had never before been found in Mound Builder tombs; 2) the absence of weapons near the skeletons bore out the theory that the Mound Builder tombs; 2) the abgarded as ancestors of the Indians, were peaceable folk, more devoted to arts than war.

*Often the mounds were piled up in the images of animals. In Wisconsin are buffalo, moose, elk, deer, fox, wolf, panther, lynx and eagle tumuli, evidently of totemic significance, the actual graves being dug hard by. These images are enormous: eagles with 1,000 ft. wingspread; panthers with 350-ft. tails. The Great Serpent Mound (Adams County, Ohio) is 1,348 ft. long, following the curves of the body and the triple-coiled tail. The opened jaws are 75 ft. across, yawning at a smaller mound -which resembles a frog.