them further from the Lower Fraser group are the extreme narrowness of the forehead and the lofty sweep of the cranial vault. This is particularly seen in the height of the transverse arc, which as measured in the one in my possession, and which is not an extreme type, from one auditory foramen to the other across the sagittal suture is exactly thirteen inches, and the length of a line joining the glabella and the occipital foramen is 14.40 inches. These dolichocephalic crania are the osteological evidence I hinted at just now which seemed to support the hypothesis that the middens of this region were formed by a preSalishan people. Whether this is so or not, this much, at any rate, seems certain, that a people of marked dolichocephaly once lived somewhere in this region, for their crania have been found at one or two other points on the Fraser between Port Hammond and the estuary.
So far no copper or other metal instruments of any kind have been found in these middens, all the relics recovered being either of bone, horn, ivory or stone. Of these by far the most numerous are bone; very few of stone are recovered. With the middens on the shores of Burrard Inlet the reverse is the case. Great numbers of stone instruments, particularly arrow- and spear-heads, have been picked up from the beach which have been washed from the old middens by the tides, the shore at several points here having sunk apparently some feet below its former level. In addition to the spear- and arrow-heads thus found, I have discovered at more than one point along these shores — which seem to be an old armoury of the midden people of that neighbourhood — several magazines or stores of designed but unfinished spear-and arrow-heads, all bearing the undoubted marks, in the method of their cleavage, of the skilled and experienced stone worker. A few well-directed blows from a skilful hand have divided larger masses of desirable stone into numbers of triangular and ovate pieces, easily transported and worked up into finished points at the arrow-maker’s leisure. The stone commonly thus broken up was either a dark argillaceous boulder of crystalline character or boulders of dark gray basalt; and as I have been unable to find any of the former in whole blocks or boulders, on the shores of Burrard Inlet or elsewhere in the neighbourhood, the breaking had probably been done at some other point by others, from whom they were not unlikely bartered for dried clams, of which they had an inexhaustible supply here, and which, we know, were highly prized by inland-dwelling tribes. And as the arrow- and spear-heads I possess, taken from the Lytton burial heaps, are of the same material it is not unlikely that this is the direction from which these stones came, as also the jade tools, jade boulders being occasionally found in the Thompson.9
It may now be interesting to pass from the middens and offer a few remarks on the tumuli or burial mounds of this region. As far as is known at present the mounds of British Columbia seem to be confined to the Cowitchin [Halkomelem] area. This may not be so in reality. It so happens that on account of that area being the most settled and accessible it has received the most attention from explorers; and this seeming restriction of area may thus be accounted for. As the country becomes more widely settled and opened up others will most probably be found in other parts of the Province. In order to describe these mounds the better I shall divide them into two groups — the Mainland group and the Vancouver Island group. Those on the island were first discovered some twenty years ago; and the late Mr. James Richardson, of the Dominion Geological Survey, and Mr. James Deans, of Victoria, B.C., opened up some of them; but the result of the investigation was never published, I think.10 I shall defer a description of these for a later occasion, my knowledge of them at the present time being too limited for me to speak with any exactitude about them, and confine my remarks to the Mainland group, which seems the more interesting of the two and which received its first systematic examination at the writer’s hands, and upon which he feels he may with more propriety speak.
While the Vancouver Island group seems to extend more or less along the coast throughout the Cowitchin area, from beyond Sooke on the southwest to Com ox on the east, that on the mainland is confined at present to a narrow strip on the banks of the Fraser extending from the village of Hatzic to Port Hammond.11 Those opened and examined by myself are found in a cluster on a ranch at Hatzic, on the right bank of the river. These sepulchres, with their ancient mode of burial, belong to a comparatively distant past. The Indians now dwelling in the neighbourhood appear to know nothing of them, disclaim all knowldge of the people who built them, and are quite unconcerned at their being opened or disturbed. This indifference in the face of the zealous vigilance they exercise over their own old burial grounds or depositories of the dead is the more striking. The difficulty of procuring osteological data from any of the burial grounds of the modern tribes is well known to any who have attempted to do so, and this unusual indifference displayed towards these mounds by the Indians of the district would seem to suggest that they belong to some antecedent and forgotten tribes. Indeed, an aged Indian of the place informed the writer that his people called them “ghost heaps,” that they were there when they first came into those parts, that no one knew who made them, and that no Indian would appoach them on any account. Indian traditions, one knows, are not very reliable data, but in this instance they support the evidence of the mounds themselves and may have a basis of truth in them. Whether they antedate the present tribes or not they were undoubtedly built when a mode of burial prevailed very different from that practised by their ancestors when the whites first came in contact with them; and the osteological data they have yielded reveal a habit of cranial deformation of a kind very unlike that known to have been practised in this region.
These tumuli are interesting, too, apart from the question of their antiquity, as they seem to present to us either a development from simple conceptions and ideas concerning the dead to more advanced and complex ones, or else they mark in a most interesting manner the different degrees of honour their builders were wont to pay to their dead. For they show a markedly graduated transition from simple interment of a body beneath a pile of clay to the construction of comparatively elaborate tombs, composed of a great number of boulders arranged in precise and geometrical order and covered with layers of different kinds of sand and clay. But I shall best describe them if I take them in what seems to me from the evidence their natural order, which I find may be with propriety arranged in a fivefold series. The simplest and first of the series, and, as I am led to believe the oldest, was formed by placing the dead body on the ground somewhat below the level of its surface and then heaping over it the neighbouring soil; for there are hollows around these mounds showing that the soil of which they are formed was taken from the spot. In all these mounds throughout the whole series, whether simple or otherwise, it should be stated, one body only was ever interred. About this there is no doubt; and this fact of separate, individual interment is the more striking in the more elaborate tombs, which must have occupied many days, if not weeks, in their construction. Many of these simpler and less conspicuous mounds have doubtless been levelled by the ranchers of that neighbourhood without attracting attention, as the bones of the body in these are always found wholly decomposed, with the single exception at times of a bit of the lower jaw, and their matter has been so closely integrated with the soil that the fact that a body once lay there is only to be discovered by the presence of a darker shade or streak in it, though the enamel casings of the teeth themselves may generally, I think, be recovered if the mounds are opened carefully. Absolutely nothing but the teeth, or their remains, or, as stated before, tiny fragments of the lower jaw which crumble away in the hand, has been found in these clay mounds; not a vestige of tools, weapons or belongings of any kind. And I may here add that it is one of the singularities of these sepulchres that not a single relic of stone, not so much as a single flake of any kind, has been taken from the whole series, though I have used the greatest care in seeking for them. In this respect the interments in these mounds present a strong contrast to those of the sandhills round Lytton, in which arrow- and spear-heads, flakes and other stone relics are found in great numbers.12 These clay or earth mounds are of varying dimensions, some of them evidently children’s graves, being only a few feet high and a yard or two in diameter; but like the more elaborate ones are always circular in form, and sometimes have a diameter of 20 to 25 feet.
Next in the series is a class of mounds formed in part like the last but differing from them in having a pile of boulders heaped up over and around the spot where the body originally lay. The plan of interment in this second class of mounds seems to have been to place the body in the centre of the spot chosen for the grave — whether sitting or prostrate I have
