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At least 13 accretional earthen and earth-stone burial mounds were constructed and used in interior Virginia during the eleventh through the¤fteenth centuries (and possibly later). These sites (Figure 2.1), which help de¤ne the Late Woodland period in interior Virginia, were originally labeled the “Lewis Creek Mound Complex” by MacCord (1986) and are also referred to as “ancestral Monacan burial mounds” (Hantman 1992, 1998). These mounds are the only Late Woodland mounds in the area, and all were used for mortuary purposes. All are of earthen or earth and stone construction, of roughly similar size, and most are located on the ®oodplains of major rivers or tributaries, many in close proximity to Late Woodland village sites. Ceramic and lithic artifacts deliberately and accidentally included in the mounds suggest temporal and cultural af¤nity among them (Boyd and Boyd 1992; Dunham 1994; Hantman 1990; MacCord 1986). Radiocarbon dates, where available, also indicate that the mounds were constructed and used during the Late Woodland period. All of the mounds were constructed accretionally, gradually built up over time by the continuous addition of new burial features capped with soil and sometimes with stone as well. Despite their similar construction, the mounds include an array of mortuary treatments. Burial treatments present in one or more of the mounds include single and multiple primary interments, cremations, bundle burials, other small secondary interments , and large collective burial features composed of the fragmented and mixed skeletal remains of 30 or more individuals each. Some of the burials were covered by rocks; some, but by no means all, included grave goods. Not all types of interment were used at each mound, but most of the mounds contained several different burial types (Table 2.1). Individual burials seem to have been most common in the early centuries of the Late Woodland period, with a transition to large collective burial features in the fourteenth and ¤fteenth centuries. Virginia Burial Mounds 2 The ¤rst recorded excavation of a Virginia burial mound remains the most famous: Thomas Jefferson’s late-eighteenth-century excavation of a mound near his home. Jefferson began his mound exploration with two competing hypotheses about the purpose of the earthen and earth-stone mounds dispersed across the landscape of central Virginia. One was that these mounds served to cover “persons fallen in battle”; the other was that they represented what he called “the common sepulchre of a town” ( Jefferson 1954). Jefferson ruled out both of his hypotheses, primarily on the basis of demographic observations of the age, number, and trauma patterns represented by the skeletons he examined. His scienti¤c method has received a great deal of attention, but his emphasis on a regional context for the mounds was equally new and important at the time he conducted Figure 2.1 Location of Virginia accretional burial mounds: (1) Clover Creek; (2) Hirsch; (3) Withrow #1; (4) Bell #1; (5) Hayes Creek; (6) John East; (7) Lewis Creek; (8) Linville; (9) Senedo; (10) Brumback; (11) Rapidan; (12) Rivanna; (13) Leesville. From Dunham, Gold and Hantman (2003). 32 | Virginia Burial Mounds Table 2.1 Continued and wrote about his work (Dunham 1994; Hantman and Dunham 1993). Jefferson’s work, though widely read, did little to discourage the idea that the Virginia burial mounds were constructed over the bodies of slain warriors. Two examples from Waddell postdate Jefferson by more than a century: According to tradition, a battle between Indians occurred on the Cowpasture river, near Millborough, Bath county, where there is a small mound supposed to cover the remains of the slain. (1886:56) [In Augusta County] on the west side of the river, a little beyond the bridge, on the Dudley farm, is what remains of an ancient arti¤cial mound. . . . It is supposed that, before the arrival of white people in the valley, a battle between Indians occurred at the spot, and that the slain were buried there. (1886:459) Institutionally supported archaeological explorations of the Virginia mounds began in 1893 under the auspices of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE). Congress established the Division of Mound Exploration as part of the BAE in 1881 and charged this new division with examining and answering questions about the origin of the earthen and stone mounds throughout the eastern United States. Within a year Cyrus Thomas was appointed its head. He was strongly interested in classifying the mounds and in replacing the classi¤cation set forth by Squier and Davis in 1848. He wanted to look at...

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