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Michigan Mound Builders
One of them presented some features distinctive of the "refuse heaps " of our Atlantic Coast, and of the north of Europe, a wide area at one end being covered with a solid crust of black ashes from eighteen inches to two feet thick, containing the bones of various animals used for food, broken pottery and stone implements. The relics from the burial mounds, in addition to those usually found, consisted of an extraordinarily large number of broken stone hammers of the rudest kind; a plate of mica five by four inches, and two necklaces, one made of small bones, mostly cervical vertebrae, stained a beautiful green color, resembling enamel, the other composed of the teeth of the moose, finely perforated at the roots, alternating with well-wrought beads of copper, and the bones of birds stained green as in the first instance. In the mound containing the last mentioned ornaments several interments had been made, and the decayed stump of a scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea, Wang.) two feet in diameter surmounted the summit, the roots spreading above the contents in all directions.
Michigan Mound Builders
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