period of their occupation was ancient. Their withdrawal was probably gradual, and completed before the advent of the ancestors of the present tribes, or simultaneous with their arrival. It seems more likely that their retirement from the country was voluntary than that they were expelled by an influx of wild tribes. If their expulsion had been the result of a protracted warfare, all remembrance of so remarkable an event would scarcely have been lost among the tribes by whom they were displaced. A warm climate was necessary for the successful maintenance of the highest form of Village Indian life. In the struggle for existence in this cold climate Indian arts and ingenuity must have been taxed quite as heavily to provide clothing as food. It is therefore not improbable that the attempt to transplant the New Mexican type of village life into the valley of the Ohio proved a failure, and that after great efforts, continued through centuries of time, it was finally abandoned by their withdrawal, first into the gulf region through which they entered, and, lastly, from the country altogether.
The Tlascalans practiced cremation, but it was generally limited to the chiefs.[1] It was the same among the Aztecs. "Others were burnt and the ashes buried in the temples, but they were all interred with whatever things of value they possessed.[2] The Mayas of Yucatan came nearer the Romans in the practice, for they preserved the ashes in earthen vessels. "The dead were much lamented," remarks Herrera, "in silence by day and with dismal shrieks by night * * * filling their mouths with ground wheat [maize] that they might not want food in the other world. * * * The bodies of their lords were burnt and their ashes put into large vessels, over which temples were built. Some made wooden statues of their parents, and leaving an hollow in the necks of them, put in their ashes and kept them among their idols with great veneration."[3] In New Mexico cremation is occasionally practiced at the present time.
That the Mound-Builders should have had this custom, in view of its prevalence among the Village Indians, would afford no cause of surprise. I think we may, not without reason, recognize in this artificial basin of clay a cremation bed, upon which the body was placed in a sitting posture, covered with fuel, and then burned—in some cases partially, and in others
