Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Prehistoric Pet?

Dog burial found in O.C.
Published: June 10, 2010 Updated: Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

“Even more intriguing are the positioning of the dog and the placement of a "cairn" — a rock marker, in this case a large acorn grinding-bowl or metate — on top of it.
Note: I was trying to recreate a search that rendered some illustrations of Orange County CA cairn burials, sometimes topped with an inverted mortar stone – of the bowl or basket type and not the metate type pictured above (along the road mentioned in my previous post of yesterday). I just found the above to be the “man bites dog” sort of alternative to the “Dogs on Mounds” that have appeared on this blog.

And here’s some widely scattered cairn burials that somehow showed up when I used “orange county burial cairn mortar pdf” in the search field: 
“Indian Habitations in Sussex County”
Spier (1915)
In addition,cairn burials—a mode of burial where large masses of rock were piled (page 22) ....”
It’s a brief mention, followed by some thoughts on Indian Trails. And preceded by thoughts on 25 Rockshelters, plus a bit about Indian land clearing of a horticultural field.
CAIRNS ON LOST HILL, AT MOUTH OF GOURD CREEK (MO)
“On the top of this particular Lost Hill are six cairns, five of them near the northern end, the sixth just where the ridge breaks off to the south. The margins are uncertain owing to the upper stones being scattered by hunters as well as by credulous individuals who are firmly fixed in the belief that all such "rock piles" contain gold hidden by Indians.
So far as can now be determined the five at the northern end were 16 to 18 feet across as left by the builders, the southernmost one being somewhat smaller. All are in uncleared land, and crevices between the stones are filled with a tangled mass of roots from the trees and bushes growing on and around them.”

CAIRN-BURIAL.

“The next mode of interment to be considered is that of cairn or rock burial, which has prevailed and is still common to a considerable extent among the tribes living in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas.
In the summer of 1872 the writer visited one of these rock cemeteries in Middle Utah, which had been used for a period not exceeding fifteen or twenty years. It was situated at the bottom of a rock slide, upon the side of an almost inaccessible mountain, in a position so carefully chosen for concealment that it would have been almost impossible to find it without a guide. Several of the graves were opened, and found to have been constructed in the following manner: A number of bowlders had been removed from the bed of the slide until a sufficient cavity had been obtained; this was lined with skins, the corpse placed therein, with weapons, ornaments, &c., and covered over with saplings of the mountain aspen; on the top of these the removed bowlders were piled, forming a huge cairn, which appeared large enough to have marked the last resting place of an elephant. In the immediate vicinity of the graves were scattered the osseous remains of a number of horses which had been sacrificed, no doubt, during the funeral ceremonies. In one of the graves, said to contain the body of a chief, in addition to a number of articles useful and ornamental, were found parts of the skeleton of a boy, and tradition states that a captive boy was buried alive at this place.”

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