CHAPTER XI. SEPULCHRAL MOUNDS. SOURCES OF INFORMATION—HILL MOUNDS—THE SCIOTO MOUND—THE TAYLOR MOUND—THE ISSAQUINA MOUND—THE ELLIOT MOUND—THE LOCKPORT MOUND —BLACK BIRD’S GRAVE—SCIOTO VALLEY MOUNDS—SYMBOLICAL RITES— HUMAN SACRIFICES—THE GRAVE CREEK MOUND—COMMON SEPULCHRES— CREMATION—SCIOTO MOUND CRANIUM—SACRED FESTIVALS. When the significance of the military and sacred enclosures of the Mound-Builders has been fully estimated as memorials of a remarkable people belonging altogether to prehistoric ages of the New World, their sepulchral mounds acquire a new value. In the former we see unmistakable indications of a settled condition of society greatly in advance of anything attained by the Red Indian, and of populous communities devoted to agriculture and other industrial arts. From the latter we may hope to recover some traits of ethnical character; to find in the gifts to the dead illustrations of their arts and customs; and to catch by means of their sepulchral rites some glimpses of the nature of that belief which stimulated the Mound-Builders to the laborious construction of so many sacred earthworks. Their great mounds are for us not merely the sepulchres of an ancient race; they are the cemetery of an early though partial civilisation, from whence we may derive illustrations of the life, manners, and ideas of a people over whose graves the forest had so long resumed its sway, that it seemed to the Red Indians’ supplanters to have been the first occupant of the soil.