Archæological Researches in Kentucky and Indiana

Abstract

IN January last Mr. Putnam laid before the Society of Natural History of Boston, U.S., an extended account of his recent archaeological researches in Kentucky and Indiana, in which he had examined several rock-shelters, caves, mounds, and circular graves. He called attention to the numerous ancient fortifications in the Ohio valley, and gave a description of two which he had visited in Indiana. These fortifications are generally earthworks, many of them of great extent; but there have been several discovered in which immense walls of stone have been used, extending in one case to j several hundred feet in length, and to nearly ten feet in height; whilst in another instance a wall about seventy-five feet in height had been erected to fill a gap in the otherwise nearly precipitous natural wall. The stones of these walls were simply laid, one overlapping another, so as to break joints, without cement of any kind. Mr. Putnam exhibited to the meeting a number of human skulls and other bones found under various conditions, and pointed out that while the skulls of the New England Indians were long and narrow and belonged to the dolichocephali, those from the mounds, the circular graves, the stone graves, and the caves were of the short, broad and high type, or the brachicephali. In the caves, however, there were two, if not three, classes of burials, and at least two well-marked forms of skull. The skulls he found in graves protected with slabs of stone were all of a form very closely resembling the high, short and broad crania of the mound builders; those of the numerous skeletons from the caves were characterised by the marked depression of the frontal bone and the equally marked concavity on the anterior part of the parietals; and the skulls from the circular graves were distinguished from the others by their decided width and shortness, and the more vertical occipital portion.