The first of the five-foot slices having been removed there appears, at the level of the surrounding field, what looks like a cement floor. At the outer edge of this and following the curve of the mound we see post holes a foot or two apart in some of which are decayed posts. These post holes prove to the explorer that this Mound was built by the Hopewell peoples. When a Hopewell Culture band or tribe picked a site for a new home, he explains, one of the first things it did was to set aside a place for the burial of its dead and for worship, a sacred place. After clearing this spot of all underbrush and trees, the top-soil was removed and in order to make a firm floor they plastered this over with clay. On top of that was placed an inch or two of sand or fine gravel for a floor-covering. The next step was to secure some posts and set them in the ground around the edge of this area to form a wall. Twigs and branches of trees were woven among these and plastered with clay to keep out cold and rain. A thatched roof made of closely woven twigs and boughs was placed over it and the sacred temple was complete. Into this they brought their dead for funeral ceremonies, burial and cremation. Our attention is suddenly called to the actual work at hand. A laborer has struck his mattock into a loose spot in the face of the Mound. We are informed that this will be a burial and, sure enough, within an hour a human skeleton has been unearthed and lies there on the floor all ready to have its picture taken. The Hopewell people, we learn, made platforms of earth a few inches above the floor and after placing their dead on these they built cabin-like structures of logs over them and covered these, in turn, by small mounds of earth. [Illustration: Fig. 9—Crematory Basin in a Hopewell Mound.] And now we come to the second burial which appears in every way like the first, excepting that instead of a skeleton there is merely a “hatful” of burned bones and ashes. This we are informed is a cremated burial. We can see no evidences that a fire has burned here and we are curious to learn how the ashes and charred bones came to be so carefully placed in a small heap. These questions are answered when we find near-by a little rectangular basin of baked clay, shaped something like a cement horse trough, built into the floor. In this basin they had cremated the body and then had removed the ashes and burned bones to the prepared platform for burial.