The burial places, or cemeteries are exceedingly abundant throughout the State.  Often hundreds of graves may be found on a single hillside.  The same people sometimes bury in scattered graves and in mounds—­the mounds being composed of a large number of cist graves.  The graves are increased by additions from time to time.  The additions are sometimes placed above and sometimes at the sides of the others.  In the first burials there is a tendency to a concentric system with the feet towards the center, but subsequent burials are more irregular, so that the system is finally abandoned before the place is desired for cemetery purposes.

Some other peculiarities are of interest.  A larger number of interments exhibit the fact that the bodies were placed there before the decay of the flesh, and in many instances collections of bones are buried.  Sometimes these bones are placed in some order about the crania, and sometimes in irregular piles, as if the collection of bones had been emptied from a sack.  With men, pipes, stone hammers, knives, arrowheads, &c., were usually found, with women, pottery, rude beads, shells, &c., with children, toys of pottery, beads, curious pebbles, &c.

     Sometimes, in the subsequent burials, the side slab of a
     previous burial was used as a portion of the second cist. 
     All of the cists were covered with slabs.

Dr. Jones has given an exceedingly interesting account of the stone graves of Tennessee, in his volume published by the Smithsonian Institution, to which valuable work[15] the reader is referred for a more detailed account of this mode of burial.

G.K.  Gilbert, of the United States Geological Survey, informs the writer that in 1878 he had a conversation with an old Moquis chief as to their manner of burial, which is as follows:  The body is placed in a receptacle or cist of stone slabs or wood, in a sitting posture, the hands near the knees, and clasping a stick (articles are buried with the dead), and it is supposed that the soul finds its way out of the grave by climbing up the stick, which is allowed to project above the ground after the grave is filled in.

The Indians of Illinois, on the Saline River, according to George Escoll Sellers,[16] inclosed their dead in cists, the description of which is as follows: 

Above this bluff, where the spur rises at an angle of about 30 deg., it has been terraced and the terrace as well as the crown of the spur have been used as a cemetery; portions of the terraces are still perfect; all the burials appear to have been made in rude stone cists, that vary in size from 13 inches by 3 feet to 2 feet by 4 feet, and from 18 inches to 2 feet deep.  They are made of thin-bedded sandstone slabs, generally roughly shaped, but some of them have been edged and squared with considerable care, particularly the covering slabs.  The slope below the terraces was thickly strewed with these slabs,