国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

Schellenberg's discovery of the casts of chaff of wheat and barley, which was used
always in mixing the clay for the thick pots shown on plates 20 (fig. 1) and 21 (fig. 1).

At first, besides cultivating the soil, they hunted wild animals, and while the
bones of these, as well as those of the animals which they domesticated later, show
that they ate the flesh of these, including the pig and probably also the fox and
wolf, these bones are not sufficiently abundant to prove that meat formed by any
means the chief part of their diet. Awls, and doubtless some other implements,
were made of bone, and straight-edged flakes* from flint; but, excepting mace-
heads, there was not found any weapon, either offensive or defensive or for the
chase—neither celt, point of arrow or of spear, nor artificially formed slingstone.
It would seem that such weapons as they had must have been of wood with fire-
hardened points or points of bone, or unformed slingstones or bolos of naturally
formed stones, or lastly lassos. Towards confirmation of this is the statement
by Dr. Duerst that the bones he examined of the wild animals were of individuals
of such ages as were easily killed.

In the lowest strata of this culture we find the practice of the peculiar mortuary
custom of burying children, and only children, under the earthen floor of the
dwelling. We were continually coming upon these little skeletons during our
excavations. They lay generally on a fire-hardened bed of earth of about the size
and shape of the hearths that occur everywhere in the floors of the dwellings,
or in places on only a layer of ashes. Many of these burials contained beads
or other burial gifts, and the intention was so evident that it seems probable that
in those cases where no gifts were found, objects of perishable materials had
disappeared, for no trace of animal or vegetable substance, excepting bones and
charcoal, has been able to survive through eighty to one hundred centuries of
Time's destroying agents. The remarkable preservation of the bones seems
to be due to the niter with which they are saturated. This burial custom was
followed so generally throughout the life of the kurgan that it would form the
basis of a proximative estimate of the density of population of the kurgan and of
its rate of growth, if we knew that all children dying under a given age were buried
in this manner. Of this, however, we have no knowledge, and it is equally possible
that they represent sacrifices. The existence of this custom through not only
this earliest culture but through the two succeeding ones as well—through many
thousand years—is a remarkable ethnological fact which, considered together with
the associated custom of burial in a contracted position, may prove to be very
useful in comparative ethnology when our knowledge of Eurasiatic and African
burials shall have increased. At present there is little mention of the custom
in ancient or modern literature. But this is perhaps due to a lack of observation
during the process of excavating. The layers of débris that accumulate slowly
during long periods of occupation are so full of bones of animals that these little
skeletons might easily escape special notice, while in the deeper culture layers