Peabody Charles. Red paint. Tome 19, From to the Department of Archaeology, of Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts carried on a series of prehistoric excava" tions in the State of Maine. Moorehead, then the Curator, now the Director of the Department conducted the expeditions and has recently published the results i. The most striking archaeological feature revealed is , the. The enormous quantities of red ochre found accompanying buried artifacts and rarely human bones designate this culture as peculiar,, if not unique.
It poses a problemwhich Moorehead states as follows3 : Β« The essential thing is, that these burials were made in unknown times of high antiquity and by a peculiar people. Why such quantities of ochre were placed in every grave, "passes understanding. It seems to me that to the mind of the aborigines the ochre was more than mere paint..
If it were considered as paint and nothing else, far smaller quantities would have sufficed. Possibly we have, in the presence of these bushels of powdered hematite, evidence of some unknown ceremony or custom.
Moorehead is right ; certainly the red ochre is more than mere paint; it may, therefore, perhaps be profitable to make some investigation of the extent and distribution of the phenomenon of red color in connection with burials and also of the possible significance of the red color, itself. It may be said at the outset that this attempt is preliminary; any geographical distribution is limited by the physical inability of an author to consult every work containing appropriate references and by the insufficiency of observations by excavators and explorers.
North America. Of these, the cases reported from Ohio, Florida, Mexico and California may be generally considered prehistoric ; those from South Carolina, California Lower and British Columbia as historic. We have. They are invariably in earth mounds or stone graves Β».
