American Indian cremation pit found

"Based on our St. Catherines experience, this is about a one-in-100 shot," Thomas said. "As a mortuary feature of that antiquity, I would say that's a big deal."

The Ossabaw cremation pit, roughly 6 feet long and 3 feet deep, had other unique characteristics.

Crass and fellow archaeologists, at first, suspected it might be a more modern grave because of its flat bottom and straight sides.

Early Indian graves tend to have round bottoms because people lacked shovels or other digging tools, said Dan Elliott, a Savannah archaeologist who helped excavate the Ossabaw pit last month.

"We're thinking it was a fairly formal structure that was used to deflesh people — it looks almost like a little oven," Elliott said. "That's so far back in history that we don't know what was on their minds, but it shows there was a special reverence for the dead."

The state Council on American Indian Concerns gave the archaeologists permission to excavate the Ossabaw pit because it was being destroyed by erosion.

The few human bones found in the pit will be studied further in hopes of determining if they belonged to more than one person. Once that's done, Crass said, they'll be reinterred with the Council overseeing the burial.

Thomas said such a find is a step in helping researchers understand America's early inhabitants, though why they would choose to cremate some of their dead and bury others intact remains a mystery.

"We don't know whether that's high status or low status. Is that the way you treat elders or battle captains?" Thomas said. "We're buried according to who we are when we die. It tells us a lot about a society by the way they treat the dead."

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