Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (Volume 1, Nos. 2-3) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1908 Excerpt: ... Prehistoric Illinois. The Brown County Ossuary. (dr. J. F. Sntdee.) With exception, perhaps, of the American bottom, no section of the State surpasses that portion of the Illinois river valley from the Sangamon down to the Mississippi in such profuse evidences of its early and long-continued occupancy by various tribes of Indians. It was the resort of mound building aborigines from the remote past up to the post-Columbian period, marked by intrusion of European art products among their sepulchred remains. In the mounds there, and the relics they inclose, can be discerned interesting and instructive differences, not only in the customs and degree of culture of the most ancient and more recent denizens of that region, but also in their physical and ethnological characteristics. The practice of mound building was carried to its highest perfection in that valley by its primitive prehistoric inhabitants. The oldest mounds are the largest and most complex in structure, and from that class of imposing earthern monuments can be traced in that locality the decadence of the custom of mound building with passing ages, down to the slight elevations of individual grave mounds of recent Indians perched upon almost every eminence of the landscape. They are all burial mounds. Artificial mounds built for signal stations, quite common on the Mississippi bluffs, and purely defensive earthworks, are very rare, if not wholly absent, in the Illinois river valley. In the older sepulchral mounds the usual Indian custom of burying all the property of the deceased with his dead body was generally observed, but in the later mounds it was measurably, and in many totally, ignored. Vessels or vases of burnt clay are almost entirely wanting in the older class of mounds as well as in the ...