it was the funereal pyre of some chief, and used for burning sacrifices for the time the funeral services lasted, and was then buried, the case is intelligible enough, but the other hypothesis is certainly not easy of explanation.
The true "Sepulchral mounds" are, as before mentioned, immensely numerous, and of all sizes, from a few feet up to such as the Grave Creek mound, 70 feet high and 1000 feet in circumference, or that at Miamisburgh, 68 feet high, and 852 feet in circumference at its base. The dead were buried in them apparently without coffins or cists, unless of wood, and generally in the contracted doubled-up position found so frequently in Scandinavia and in Algeria.
The "Temple mounds" are generally square or oblong truncated pyramids, with inclined planes leading up to them on three and frequently on all four sides. They are in fact in earth the same form as the Teocallis of the Mexicans, though the latter seem always to have been in stone. Whether in the one material or the other, they are of a perfectly intelligible templar form. If a human sacrifice or any great ceremonial is to take place before all the people, the first requisite is an elevated platform where the ministrants can stand above the heads of the crowd, and be seen by all; and the absence of this in the Ohio and in our English circles is one of the most fatal objections to the temple theory. In one or two instances a single earthen Teocalli is found within the circles, but this no further militates against the supposition that they were residences than the presence of a chapel or place of worship in any of our palaces would prove them to be temples also. It must, however, be borne in mind that it is always difficult to draw a hard and fast line between the House of God and the Palace of the King. In Egypt it is never possible, and in the middle ages royal monasteries and royal residences were frequently interchangeable terms. We should not therefore feel surprised if, in America, we found the one fading into the other. But, on the whole, the enormous number of these circular enclosures — 1000 and 1500 in one State — their immense size, 100 and 200 acres being not unfrequent, and the general absence of all signs of preparations for worship, seem sufficient to prove that they must be classed among civil and not among sacred erections.
