Naturally grave burial, of which the gravel kame burial is one of several closely analogous types or variations, obtained more generally among those tribes in which mound-building was least practised, although it is unreasonable to suppose that those who carried mound burial to its highest development disposed of all their dead in that manner. The "high places" of the earth have appealed to human kind through all time and in all parts of the world as places of interment and worship, and their utilization by the Ohio tribes is by no means unique.
The Algonquin Culture
Notwithstanding that approximately two-thirds of the area of the state of Ohio, at the time of the Iroquoian conquest, is supposed to have been populated by tribes of the Algonquian linguistic stock, no attempt appears to have been made to indicate their archaeological remains within the territory. This may be due, in part, to the overshadowing interest evoked by the more evident mound-building cultures and their tumuli; at any rate, little cognizance seems to have been taken of the fact that other groups of aborigines, to whose culture the building of mounds was foreign or only incidental, doubtless were resident throughout the greater part of the area.
The culture which we here presume to designate as the Algonquian, and the characteristics of which we shall attempt to outline, in so far as may be done from minor remains, appears to have been widespread in its occupancy of the state, embracing not only the territory of the mound-building cultures, but practically all habitable territory adjacent thereto.
While data respecting the Algonquian culture are not numerous, among the distinctive traits applying to their prehistoric ethnology, as cited by Wissler,[1] may be mentioned the following: a rather weak development of pottery; work in stone and bone weakly developed; and probably considerable use of copper. According to the same author the grooved stone axe, the elongated pestle, and the bannerstones and other problematic objects, are to be attributed
- ↑ Wissler: p. 221.
