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1923] Jones: Mound Excavations Near Stockton 119
the heads and pelves were in contact. Immediately beneath them
was a bed of ashes and charcoal, and the bones of the legs showed
blackening and charring by fire. At the feet were a rough paint
mortar and three rounded brook pebbles of the variety generally
used as hammerstones, together with the bones of two birds and one
bird bone which had been pointed as an implement. On the left side
of the chest of the lower skeleton, between the ribs and the flexed
forearm, with its mouth directed toward the feet (east), was a cylin-
drical vessel of magnesian mica, some 10 inches long and of oval
section. This "vase" was empty and the position in which it was
found showed that it had been hugged to the left side by the left
arm of the person with whom it had been buried. While the soil in
which these skeletons were found was rather loose and not at all
tightly packed, the cavity formed by the arching ribs was nearly
empty; only two handfuls of dirt had sifted through the spaces
between the ribs of the lower skeleton. The interments thus seem
comparatively recent in spite of the fact that other bodies had been
buried above these two. That the two recovered individuals had been
buried simultaneously was equally manifest. These two skeletons
were located 4 feet from the edge of the levee and in what must have
been the outer edge of the upper flat portion of the mound at the
time of its occupancy.
'STRATIFICATION
On the southwest side of the levee was a strip of the mound
remaining undisturbed. It was from 5 to 10 feet in width between
the rise of the levee and the ditch cut in dredging, and presented
toward the false channel of the slough an almost vertical face, repre-
sented in the map as the portion between A and B. This vertical
face through the mound nearly at the edge of the high central portion
which must have been the place of erection of huts, exhibited the
stratification of the original mound. From the surface to the base
at the highest part of the section, midway between A and B, the strata
are as follows.
Surface stratum: light yellowish brown clay mixed with sand and
humus and covered with weeds and brush: 18 inches thick, tapering
to 6 inches at either end of the section.
Second: at the junction of the surface stratum and the third layer
is a clearly defined series of ash deposits, not continuous, but pretty
well distributed, and varying in diameter from a few inches to 2 or
more feet, and in thickness from a mere trace to 3 inches.