the excavations the more numerous and
elaborate were the objects revealed. Most of the skeletons were in a
poor state of preservation, but several could have been saved had we
the proper means at our disposal to care for them.

No evidence of cremation of the dead was found, either at Awatobi or
Sikyatki, nor have I yet detected any reference to this custom among
the modern Hopi Indians. They have, however, a strange concept of the
purification of the breath-body, or shade of the dead, by fire, which,
although I have always regarded it as due to the teaching of Christian
missionaries, may be aboriginal in character. This account of the
judgment of the dead is as follows:

There are two roads from the grave to the Below. One of these is a
straight way connected with the path of the sun into the Underworld.
There is a branch trail which divides from this straight way, passing
from fires to a lake or ocean (_patuebha_). At the fork of the road
sits Tokonaka, and when the breath-body comes to this place this chief
looks it over and, if satisfied, he says "_Uem-pac lo-la-mai, ta ai_,"
"You are very good; go on." Then the breath-body passes along the
straight way to the far west, to the early _Sipapu_, the Underworld
from which it came, the home of Mueiyinwu. Another breath-body comes to
the fork in the road, and the chief says, "You are bad," and he
conducts it along the crooked path to the place of the first fire pit,
where sits a second chief, Tokonaka, who throws the bad breath-body
into the fire, and after a time it emerges purified, for it was not
wholly bad. The chief says, "You are good now," and carries it back to
the first chief, who accepts the breath-body and sends it along the
straight road to the west.

If, on emerging from the first fire, the soul is still unpurified, or
not sufficiently so to be accepted, it is taken to the second fire pit
and cast into it. If it emerges from this thoroughly purified, in the
opinion of the judge, it is immediately transformed into a
_ho-ho-ya-ueh_, or prayer-beetle. All the beetles we now see in the
valleys or among the mesas were once evil Hopi. If, on coming out of
the second fire pit, the breath-body is still considered bad by the
chief, he takes it to the third fire, and, if there be no evil in it
when it emerges from this pit, it is metamorphosed into an ant, but if
unpurified by these three fires--that is, if the chief still finds
evil left in the breath-body--he take