almost solely to the excavations made by Dr. Gann. About eighty miles from the coast on the Old River, he found cist-burials, as mentioned above, urn-burials, in which the bones were partly cremated, and burials both in a recumbent and in a seated position. From the remains associated with the bones it is evident that the cist-burials, both here and elsewhere in British Honduras, contained the bodies of men of higher rank. At all the sites mentioned above burials were found marked by mounds, but the presence of the latter is not invariable, and it may be that as excavation proceeds many cemeteries will be found of which no indications exist upon the surface. At a site on the Rio Hondo, Dr. Gann was able to distinguish between three distinct types of burial. The poorest graves were found associated in some numbers in large flat mounds, sometimes half an acre in extent; the bodies were contracted, and the grave objects included hammer-stones, beads of clay and shell, rude weapons and unburnished pottery. A better class of interment occurred singly, in separate conical mounds of limestone blocks and dust, about 18 feet high, with finer pottery and beads of stone; in these the bodies were also contracted, and sometimes arranged head downwards. The finest graves were cist-burials, each in a separate mound from twenty to fifty feet high; in these the body lay at full length, and the associated objects included fine painted vases, beads of jadeite, pearl-shell and obsidian, and finely flaked stone implements. In Yucatan, burials have occasionally been found in the so-called "chultunes," or stone-lined cisterns used by the former inhabitants; and human remains, some suggesting cremation, have been discovered in the caves. The evidence respecting the latter, however, seems to suggest that these caves were not inhabited at an early period, and that the human occupation did not last for any length of time; it is probable that they were used only as places of refuge.
