According to Pinkerton,[30] who took the account from Smith’s Virginia, the Werowance of Virginia preserved their dead as follows: 

In their Temples they have his [their chief God, the Devil’s] image euill favouredly carved, and then painted and adorned with chaines of copper, and beads, and covered with a skin, in such manner as the deformitie may well suit with such a God.  By him is commonly the sepulchre of their Kings.  Their bodies are first bowelled, then dried upon hurdles till they be very dry, and so about the most of their ioynts and necke they hang bracelets, or chaines of copper, pearle, and such like, as they use to wear.  Their inwards they stuffe with copper beads, hatchets, and such trash.  Then lappe they them very carefully in white skins, and so rowle them in mats for their winding-sheets.  And in the Tombe, which is an arch made of mats, they lay them orderly.  What remaineth of this kind of wealth their Kings have, they set at their feet in baskets.  These temples and bodies are kept by their Priests.

For their ordinary burials, they dig a deepe hole in the earth with sharpe stakes, and the corpse being lapped in skins and mats with their Jewels they lay them upon stickes in the ground, and so cover them with earth.  The buriale ended, the women being painted all their faces with blacke cole and oyle doe sit twenty-foure houres in the houses mourning and lamenting by turnes with such yelling and howling as may expresse their great passions. * * *

Upon the top of certain red sandy hills in the woods there are three great houses filled with images of their Kings and devils and the tombes of their predecessors.  Those houses are near sixty feet in length, built harbourwise after their building.  This place they count so holey as that but the priests and Kings dare come into them; nor the savages dare not go up the river in boates by it, but that they solemnly cast some piece of copper, white beads or pocones into the river for feare their Okee should be offended and revenged of them.

They think that their Werowances and priests which they also esteeme quiyough-cosughs, when they are deade doe goe beyond the mountains towards the setting of the sun, and ever remain there in form of their Okee, with their bedes paynted rede with oyle and pocones, finely trimmed with feathers, and shall have beads, hatchets, copper, and tobacco, doing nothing but dance and sing with all their predecessors.  But the common people they suppose shall not live after deth, but rot in their graves like dede dogges.

This is substantially the same account as has been given on a former page, the verbiage differing slightly, and the remark regarding truthfulness will apply to it as well as to the other.

Figure 1 may again be referred to as an example of the dead-house described.

The Congaree or Santee Indians of South Carolina, according to Lawson, used a process of partial embalmment, as will be seen from the subjoined extract from Schoolcraft;[31] but instead of laying away the remains in caves, placed them in boxes supported above the ground by crotched sticks.