Canada. Paleo-Indian site might demonstrate early ritual

... The earthen mounds of eastern North America are rich with symbolic meaning, but glimpses of the ceremonial lives of more-ancient peoples who lived lighter on the land and built no enduring monuments are much harder to catch.

Canadian archaeologists Brian Deller and Christopher Ellis have been studying the Crowfield site in southwestern Ontario since the 1980s. In a recently published report, the researchers make the bold claim that the area is “one of the most important Paleo-Indian sites ever reported.”

The reason for its importance, they say, is the light it casts on the symbolic aspects of ancient lives.

The Crowfield site is on a sandy knoll near the town of Strathroy. The principal feature is a shallow pit that contains the burned fragments of more than 180 flint tools, including 17 spear points of a type known to have been used by some of the earliest people to inhabit the region — the so-called Paleo-Indians.

Deller and Ellis say the pit represents the cremation burial of a Paleo-Indian, but they argue that any ancient bones that might have been present there have completely decomposed over the millennia.

With no human remains to go by, why do they say it was a cremation?
...
dispatch.com
Related: Crowfield Site