Beginning with the warlike northern invaders, the Iroquois, it clearly appears that they were accustomed to construct burial mounds. Colden states that the corpse was placed in a large round hole and that “they then raise the Earth in a round Hill over it.”[50] Further particulars are given by Lafitau: the grave was lined with bark, and the body roofed in with bark and branches in the shape of an arch, which was then covered with earth and stones so as to form an _agger_ or _tumulus_.[51] In these instances the mound was erected over a single corpse; but it was also the custom among the Hurons and Iroquois, as we are informed by Charlevoix, to collect the bones of their dead every ten years, and inter them in one mass together.[52] The slain in a battle were also collected into one place and a large mound heaped over them, as is stated by Mr. Paul Kane,[53] and that such was an ancient custom of the Iroquois tribes, is further shown by a tradition handed down from the last century, according to which the Iroquois believed that the Ohio mounds were the memorials of a war which in ancient times they waged with the Cherokees.[54] Mr. E. G. Squier, who carefully examined many of the earthworks in the country of the ancient Iroquois, was inclined at first to suppose the remains he found there were parts of “a system of defence extending from the source of the Allegheny and Susquehanna in New York, diagonally across the country through central and northern Ohio to the Wabash,” and hence drew the inference that “the pressure of hostilities [upon the mound-builders] was from the north-east.”[55] This opinion has been repeated by some recent writers; but Mr. Squier himself substantially retracted it in a later work, and reached the conviction that whatever ancient remains there are in Western New York and Pennsylvania are to be attributed to the later Indian tribes and not to the Mound-builders.[56] The neighbors of the Iroquois, the various Algonkin tribes, were occasionally constructors of mounds. In comparatively recent times we have a description of a “victory mound” raised by the Chippeways after a successful encounter with the Sioux. The women and children threw up the adjacent surface soil into a heap about five feet high and eight or ten feet in diameter, upon which a pole was erected, and to it tufts of grass were hung, one for each scalp taken.[57] Robert Beverly, in his _History of Virginia_, first published in 1705, describes some curious constructions by the tribes there located. He tells us that they erected “pyramids and columns” of stone, which they painted and decorated with wampum, and paid them a sort of worship. They also constructed stone altars on which to offer sacrifices.[58] This adoration of stones and masses of rocks—or rather of the genius which was supposed to reside in them—prevailed also in Massachusetts and other Algonkin localities, and easily led to erecting such piles.[59]