Iroquois Indian Charnel Houses of the Dead and Burial Mounds

Iroquois Indian Charnel Houses of the Dead and Burial Mounds

Iroquois burial mound in northern Indiana.  Many of these mounds held many skeletal remains that is indicative of  a charnel house for the dead. Indiana archaeologists continue to desecrate these ancient Iroquois holy sites.

     To this custom, which is not confined to the Iroquois, is doubtless to be ascribed the burrows and bone-mounds which have been found in such numbers in various parts of the country. On opening these mounds the skeletons are usually found arranged in horizontal layers, a conical pyramid, those in each layer radiating from a common center. In other cases they are found placed promiscuously.

This type of spoked burial is common within the burial mounds from northern Indiana, east to New York. Despite the overwhelming evidence that these burials are Iroquois, archaeologist refuse to acknowledge the fact in order circumvent the Native American Graves Protection Act of 1993. Iroquois burial mounds are now the source of grants for university summer school digs.

Dr. D. G. Brinton likewise gives an account of the interment of collected bones:

East of the Mississippi nearly every nation was accustomed at stated periods—usually once in eight or ten years—to collect and clean the osseous remains of those of its number who had died in the intervening time, and inter them in one common sepulcher, lined with choice furs, and marked with a mound of wood, stone, or earth. Such is the origin of those immense tumuli filed with the mortal remains of nations and generations, which the antiquary, with irreverent curiosity, so frequently chances upon in all portions of our territory. Throughout Central America the same usage obtained in various localities, as early writers and existing monuments abundantly testify. Instead of interring the bones, were they those of some distinguished chieftain, they were deposited in the temples or the council-houses, usually in small chests of canes or splints. Such were the charnel-houses which the historians of De Soto’s expedition so often mention, and these are the “arks” Adair and other authors who have sought to trace the decent of the Indians from the Jews have likened to that which the ancient Israelites bore with them in their migration.