Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/225

 DELABARRE AND WILDER] INDIAN CORN-HILLS 213

in possession of the Indians until the close of King Philip's war. Several former sites of Indian villages have been discovered on it, and it was undoubtedly once extensively cultivated. There seems to be some evidence that it was little inhabited after the great plague of 1616. The passage of three hundred years, however, has left its ancient corn-fields still clearly marked in woods, pastures, and other places left untilled by the whites. Some families long resident on the neck still call them Indian corn-hills. Four separate local- ities, as enumerated above, are known to the writers, and there are very likely others which they have not yet explored. The total area known to be occupied thus is about thirty acres, which must include over eighty thousand hills.

The cultivation here, in every one of the four localities, was in the highest degree regular and orderly. The hills lie in almost per- fectly regular parallel rows, nearly evenly spaced in the rows, so that the lines are straight not only in one direction, but also in the direc- tion at right angles to that, and likewise in the two diagonals. Two of the localities are in woods. In such situations they are least clearly marked because the decay of leaves and fallen branches is slowly obliterating them by filling in the spaces between them. One of our photographs shows them, though not so clearly as they can be seen on the spot, underneath a white pine tree that is six feet in circumference at the base. The other two localities are in open pastures, offering better opportunities for study. In both of these places the direction of the rows, corrected for magnetic varia- tion, is N. 20 E. and E. 20 S., uniform in the eight different meas- urements taken. The two localities are separated by about half a mile, one being on the Taunton river side of the neck, the other near Assonet bay. One field in the woods is on the top of a narrow ridge that runs about north and south in the middle of the neck, at a place where it is nearly level, fifty to sixty feet above sea-level. The other three are on ground that runs from this ridge down to- wards the water on the one side or the other in alternate slopes and levels, and for the most part on the level portions.

The spacing of the hills is not the two feet of the Hurons, but very nearly the same as that found by Lapham in Wisconsin,

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