A Weeden Island Burial Mound - Open site which contains PDF ...

expanse showing on the west and north sides. The pure sandy
ground surface yielded scattered collections of potsherds for
a distance of 50 yards around the mound. The area was then
enclosed in a large pasture, overgrown with scrub oaks and pines,
but had once been cultivated.
Two profiles, a south profile of the center trench and a
north profile axis trench, indicate the extent of the pothunters’
operations which had preceded our salvage on the balance of the
mound. In the east periphery of the mound our axis trench
uncovered a small pottery cache confined within fivo-foot squares
and a group of burials, made on round base, which seemed to be
concentrated around the pottery cache. How closely the pothunters@
dig had come to the cache is evident from the profile drawings
of our excavations. The area of the cache contained numerous
tree rootsand these may have served to lead the original digging
away from the main concentration of burials and the cache itself.
The material salvaged from the portions of the mound which
still showed good archeological context came from the mound fill,
mound base, and the pottery cache. The 22 burials uncovered
were in very poor condition of preservation. Only three carried
burial furniture, in each case consisting of small disc-shaped
shell beads. Other artifacts cataloged came from scattered
points of the reraining shell of the mound and are exhibited in
Plate Fo. 1. Twenty of the pottery vessels from the cache were
cataloged in the field as “restorable”, but this proved to be
an over-optimistic appraisal when the collections were
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