Feature # 3 - Burials

There is a large issue with burials when excavating in North America, as I have mentioned before in previous posts.  While Ohio is known for its burial mounds (predominantly Serpent Mound, as depicted below), there are still a lot of politics behind the excavation of a native burial.

Many natives feel the right to claim the remains of a loved one, not allowing museum excavators to touch or collect any sort of artifacts or skeletal remains found in a burial.  Much paperwork and legal negotiations need to be made, more complicated than I can even explain in a blog post.  So, for the sake of sanity, I will leave it at that.  At the site, we have run into human burials, which we could tell were human by the skeletal remains (they are distinctively different than animals remains, obviously).  This encounter was largely unintentional, since we only using sensing devices to read disturbances in the soil.  This means that we cannot tell what we are excavating beforehand, just that we will be excavating some sort of feature.  So, when we do encounter a human burial, we leave it alone, fill up the feature, and move on.  We have excavated a few dog burials, though, demonstrating the connective canine companionship associated with domestication.  Even though dogs were also used as a source of food, these burials suggest that the term "man's best friend" still applies.  The way we could tell that these features were dog burials was that the remains of the dogs were lain in a certain intentional stance rather than just thrown and scattered about.  Also, we found some sherds of pottery with traces of some sort of food or organic materials around the dog remains, suggesting that these pots were ritualistic instead of just trash.  I found this feature fascinating because though we were not able to excavate the human remains, we were able to see at least some sort of ritualistic elements involved in burials in a small scale, making me wonder to what extend human burials were elaborate.  It is amazing to see how so many things may interconnect and point out information for other fascinating topics.