A New Burial Pattern Appears

Much of our work of late involves the recording of burial features. We are working at the southern boundary of Lot 4 in an effort to join together our block excavation areas from 2004 and 2005 (see our excavation plan in the June 24 post). As it turns out, this area contains a relatively dense cluster of adult and subadult (child) burials but almost no domestic features (i.e., cooking pits, storage pits, and midden or trash deposits). Several of the smaller (subadult?) burial pits we have recorded contain loose soil and only fragments of human bone. A cross-section of one of these is shown below.


These pits most likely represent graves from which the remains were exhumed by prehistoric Native Americans. We do not yet understand why such burials were disinterred; however, we have found other adult burials that contained the bundled remains of children. Perhaps some of these young ones were exhumed from their individual graves for reburial with relatives. Interestingly, many of these subadult burials lie just to the southeast of a distinct alignment of adult graves which runs northeast to southwest. This pattern is unlikely to be random but rather is evidence of a preplanned cemetery.

A few burials in this cluster contain undisturbed remains of children like Burial Feature 07-08 which was found just this week. It contained the skeleton of a young child and included several marginella shell beads and the single shell disk bead pictured below.

The Early Woodland Ossuary

A few posts ago, I described a burned earth feature which we called Feature 07-01. I noted that it most likely was associated with a cluster of human bones. Much time has been spent over the last week excavating Feature 07-01 in plan and carefully exposing what lies beneath. We were amazed to learn that this rather modestly sized feature contains the disarticulated remains of at least 13 people! An image of Feature 07-01 before excavation is shown above (the blue oval shows the maximum extent of the feature).

We refer to this large bone cluster as an "ossuary" or mass burial pit. It contains individual concentrations (or "bundles") of remains which include skulls, longbones, pelves, vertebrae, and hand and foot bones. They most likely represent the collected remains of individuals who died elsewhere, and whose bones were cleaned of flesh and packaged for transport to a common place of interment. Such a secondary form of burial contrasts drastically with the primary extended and flexed burial treatments described previously. We don't completely understand why some groups buried their dead together in this fashion, while others favored the use of individual graves. Here is a copy of our field drawing of what we now call Burial Feature 07-04.


Interestingly, the original burned earth feature now seems to have been a late addition to this feature. It is outlined in the upper right hand portion of the drawing and appears to be devoid of bone. This suggests that this hearth or cooking pit was dug into the pre-existing ossuary, most likely by accident. A collection of scattered bone on the upper (north) edge of the ossuary appears to been displaced from the hole dug by the later hearth-builders and redeposited into the ossuary. Several Leimbach series pot sherds have been found in the fill of the ossuary pit which indicate that it dates to the Early Woodland period (ca. 1000 to 500 B.C.).

Excavation of this very complex feature will continue for some time, and more surprises most likely await us.

Tracking Mortuary Behavior

One of the most intriguing kinds of information that has come from our work at the Danbury site is the evidence for changes in mortuary treatment (i.e., how people buried their dead) over time. This is due in part to the fact that the temporal perspective at Danbury is very long, nearly 5,000 years, and because most groups established small cemeteries during their years of residence.

Shown below are images from our field maps showing two of the burials we recorded this season.



These two (Burial Features 07-01 and 07-03) show the remains of two adults buried in very similar fashion. They are referred to as "extended, primary interments" which means that each person was buried soon after they died and on their backs with arms to the sides. This burial form is very similar to the way many people are buried today. Notice that BF 07-01 (top image) is missing all of the right leg and the lower half of the left leg. These bones appear to have been removed during backhoe excavation during road construction. At present, we do not know the time period of these burials since no temporally sensitive artifacts were recovered with them. Still, this extended form of burial and the northwest to southeast orientation of the skeletons is typical of all the Late Woodland period (ca. 1,000 years old) burials found so far.

In contrast, is Burial Feature 07-02 shown below. This individual, also an adult, was interred in


what is called a "flexed" position with knees drawn up to the chest and arms flexed on or in front of the body. This posture somewhat resembles a fetal position, and, accordingly, some researchers speculate that positioning the body in this way mimics the birth posture and symbolizes the passage from life to the afterlife. A more practical explanation is that the flexing of a body allowed it to be placed in an already-existing storage pit. The bones of this individual are very fragmentary and poorly preserved which may indicate great age. We have found two other flexed burials in similarly poor states of preservation. One of these is the oldest yet found and dates to 4,800 years ago, during the Late Archaic period. So, perhaps we are looking at two different forms of mortuary treatment, extended vs. flexed, which are separated by thousands of years and, perhaps, different belief systems.