Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/233

 DELABARRE AND WILDER] INDIAN CORN-HILLS 221

street and the two rows of houses. The more expanded portion of the higher land is to the observer's left (east), and runs from here nearly half a mile before the end of the bluff is reached, and the presumable site of the palisade.

The arrangement of the separate hills does not quite correspond to the double alignment of the fields of Assonet, nor is at all like the perfectly irregular order described by Lapham, which may per- haps have for its cause the method of planting on partially cleared forest areas. It is an alignment in one direction only, fairly straight rows running from northwest to southeast, but with the distance between the individual hills of each row so irregular that for the most part the hills do not line .up when viewed across the longitu- dinal rows, either at right angles or diagonally. In a few spots there is such a chance alignment, but it does not continue more than a. few hills, and is plainly a chance arrangement.

The rows were evidently run by eye, without the use of a line r as they do not keep quite straight, but get to curving quite per- ceptibly, all* in one direction, when looking down the entire field.. The average distance from row to row is a little more than 3 feet;; we had a meter stick to measure them with and the meter stick,, would about span them from the center of one hill to that of the nearest one in the adjacent row. The distance from one hill to the next in the same row was approximately the same, although the fact that definite cross-rows could not be perceived was a clear proof that there was no constancy in this direction. Down in the south corner of the field, where it was the most overgrown by the spirea bushes, the distances were rather greater than elsewhere, that between rows being fully four feet. In one or two places, where a curving of one or two rows had left a chance space between the rows, a single hill, or perhaps two hills, were squeezed in out of alignment, evidently with the utilitarian purpose only of getting in all the corn-hills possible within that area. At the present time the entire meadow is rather wet for successful corn planting, but the very next field to it on the east was planted to corn only last year, and the crop was apparently a good one. This field was lower, and has in the middle some standing water at present, but even

�� �