examination of their burial mounds, ancient cemeteries, and other
depositories of their dead, present so many striking resemblances
to those of the Indians when first encountered by the whites, as
to leave little room for doubt regarding their identity.
[Footnote: Evidence bearing on this point will be found in the
paper on The Burial Mounds of the Northern Sections, by C. Thomas,
in the Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology.] Nor is
this similarity limited to the customs in the broad and general
sense, but it is carried down to the more minute and striking
peculiarities.

Among the general features in which resemblances are noted are the
following:

The mound-builders were accustomed to dispose of their dead in
many different ways; their modes of sepulture were also quite
varied. The same statements will apply with equal force to the
Indians.

"The commonest mode of burial among North American Indians," we
are informed by Dr. H. C. Yarrow, [Footnote: First Annual Report
Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, 1879-'80 (1881), p.
93.] "has been that of interment in the ground, and this has taken
place in a number of ways." The different ways he mentions are, in
pits, graves, or holes in the ground; in stone graves or cists; in
mounds; beneath or in cabins, wigwams, houses or lodges, and in
caves.

The most common method of burial among the mound-builders was by
inhumation also, and all the different ways mentioned by Dr.