Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/204

 One of these, just opened in an excavation for a new oil well, showed a pit twenty-seven feet deep, cribbed up with timber, and containing a rude ladder like those found in the Lake Superior copper mines. The timber used for the inclosure of the ancient pit had been cut with a blunt-edged instrument, doubtless of stone.

I afterward found similar pits in the oil regions of Kentucky and Tennessee, at Mecca and Grafton, Ohio, and at Enniskillen, in Canada. In the latter locality the oil was obtained by sinking pits to the depth of forty or fifty feet in the Drift clay, the oil issuing from crevices in the underlying rock and accumulating beneath the clay. In the excavation of one of these pits an ancient one of similar character was brought to light. This was filled with rubbish, twigs, leaves, etc., and a pair of antlers was taken from it at a depth of thirty-seven feet. The antiquity of this pit, like those of Oil Creek, was proved by the large trees growing over it.

The contents of their sepulchral mounds have supplied some information—though less than we desire—of the domestic habits of the mound-builders. Usually the bones they contain are so much decomposed in the lapse of time that they have given us but an imperfect knowledge of their osteology. From the few remains found well preserved we may, however, infer that as a people they were of average size, of fair proportions, and with a cranial development not unlike that of our modern Indians. The jaws were somewhat prognathous; their teeth—as is usual with all peoples who make much use of their jaws for mastication—are strong and regular; and the wisdom-tooth, which in our jaws, shortened by disuse, has inadequate room and is of little value, was with them one of the largest and most useful of the set. On account of the lengthened under jaw, the incisors met in direct opposition, and apparently because they used their teeth for grinding seeds of which the envelopes contained much silica, they are often found uniformily worn down nearly to the jaw. We know little of the crops the mound-builders cultivated except that their great staple was corn, and that they raised and used tobacco.

They buried their dead with imposing ceremonies, and not unfrequently cremated their remains on a kind of altar which occupies the center of the sepulchral mound, and, as is the habit with perhaps all primitive people, vases, weapons, tools, and ornaments were buried with the body. Of these the pottery sometimes shows considerable taste and skill—the vessels having graceful forms and being often ornamented with colors or with incised designs. The weapons and implements that are found so abundantly in the mounds and scattered over the surface are rarely of copper, generally of stone. Of these the arrow-heads, spear-heads, daggers,