e bones were taken out, placed in a
box made of canes, and then deposited in the temple. The common dead
were mourned and lamented for a period of three days. Those who fell
in battle were honored with a more protracted and grievous
lamentation.

Bartram[75] gives a somewhat different account from Roman of burial
among the Choctaws of Carolina:

The Chactaws pay their last duties and respect to the deceased in a
very different manner. As soon as a person is dead, they erect a
scaffold 18 or 20 feet high in a grove adjacent to the town, where
they lay the corps, lightly covered with a mantle; here it is
suffered to remain, visited and protected by the friends and
relations, until the flesh becomes putrid, so as easily to part from
the bones; then undertakers, who make it their business, carefully
strip the flesh from the bones, wash and cleanse them, and when dry
and purified by the air, having provided a curiously-wrought chest
or coffin, fabricated of bones and splints, they place all the bones
therein, which is deposited in the bone-house, a building erected
for that purpose in every town; and when this house is full a
general solemn funeral takes place; when the nearest kindred or
friends of the deceased, on a day appointed, repair to the
bone-house, take up the respective coffins, and, following one
another in order of seniority, the nearest relations and connections
attending their respective corps, and the multitude following after
them, all as one family, with united voice of alternate allelujah
and lamentation, slowly proceeding on to the place of general
interment, when they place the coffins in order, forming a
pyramid;[76*] and, lastly, cover all over with earth, which raises a
conical hill or mount; when they return to town in order of solemn
procession, concluding the day with a festival, which is called the
feast of the dead.

Morgan[77] also alludes to this mode of burial:

The body of the deceased was exposed upon a bark scaffolding erected
upon poles or secured upon the limbs of trees, where it was left to
waste to a skeleton. After this had been effected by the process of
decomposition in the open air, the bones were removed either to the
former house of the deceased, or to a small bark house by its side,
prepared for their reception. In this manner the skeletons of the
whole family were preserved from generation to generation b