These cists or cubby-holes range in size from a foot to 5 feet in diameter, and are nearly always on a level of the floor, although in some instances they extend below it.
Storage cists are also sometimes excavated in the exterior walls of the cliffs, and occasionally they are partly excavated and partly inclosed by a rough, semicircular wall.
The harvest was, as a rule, permanently stored in the home villages, and the cists were used only for temporary storage.
The burial cistsare built usually in a corner or against a wall of a cliff dweller's house, but sometimes they are built against a cliff wall, and occasionally stand out alone.
It is not meant that the crops when gathered were placed in these cists and kept there until used.
The western room was pierced by a window opening which was subsequently filled up, possibly by the Navaho, who have five burial cists here.
Such burials are still made, both in the ruins themselves and in cists on similar sites.
Moreover, some of the storage ciststhat occur in conjunction with dwellings differ from the latter only in size and in their separation from the other rooms.
As a whole the Navaho burial cists are much more difficult of access than the ruins, and some of them appear to be now really inaccessible, a statement which can be made of but few ruins.
The harvest is gathered at the proper time and what is not eaten at once is hidden away incists of old or modern construction.
A large proportion of the cists found in De Chelly were burial places and of Navaho origin.
The immense number of storage cists found in De Chelly are a natural outgrowth of the conditions there and support the hypothesis that the cliff outlooks were merely farming shelters.
The number of burial cists in the canyon is remarkable; there are hundreds of them.
There are several Navaho burial cists on this site.
In its inner wall, at the north side of the quadrangle, three interments had been made by scooping out small cists in the earth, depositing the remains therein, and filling in with limestone dust and rubble.
Neither the cists nor the body of the mound contained anything of interest except a few fragments of bone in the last stages of disintegration.
The remains of fifteen human burials were also encountered, three of which had the bodies enclosed in cists made of large bricks.
On the average these cists measured a mètre in length, and half this in breadth and depth, but one or two of smaller dimensions were noted.
In a communication to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on a group of stone cists disclosed, in 1879, on the farm of Teinside, Teviotdale, Lord Rosehill thus describes part of the contents of one of them.
The stonecists resemble very much the chamber of a passage-grave.
On another ridge the same parties found another row with four stone mounds similar to those described, except that the cistswere square instead of circular, the sides of the latter being equal to the diameter of the former.
A number of cists have been found in Tennessee, and are thus described by Moses Fiske: [Footnote: Trans.
Tartars, living sepulchers of tree burial of Tennessee mound burial stone graves or cists Tiffany, A.
Stone graves or cists of Solutre, France Tennessee mounds Suggestions for collectors Superstitions regarding burial feasts Superterrene and aerial burial Surface burial Swallow, G.
Sioux burial above ground "ghost gamble" lodge burial Sioux mourning observances scaffold burial Solutre, France, stone graves or cists of Songs and burial food burial South Carolina mummies urn burial Spainhour, Dr.
It is not an unusual thing to find a mound containing a number of those cists arranged in two, three, or more tiers.
In the American Antiquarian for July, 1881, is the description of one of these cists found in a mound in the eastern part of Montgomery County.
The dead in the earlier period wore laid (so far as we know at present) within cists constructed of upright stones.
On all the roads we ride daily past wall-like stone cists covered with slabs, on which the formula "Om mani padme hum" is carved.
A number of cists have been found in Tennessee, and are thus described by Moses Fiske[14] There are many burying grounds in West Tennessee with regular graves.
Some of the cists that I explored were paved with valves of fresh-water shells, but most generally with the fragments of the great salt-pans, which in every case are so far gone in decay as to have lost the outside markings.
In 1814 several cists were discovered in the parish of Borthwick, Mid-Lothian, of the ordinary character and proportions, and in some cases containing urns, one of which is now in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
But the cists lay irregularly in various directions, giving no indication of any chosen mode or prevailing custom.
In 1824 a number of cists were discovered in making a new approach to Blair Drummond House, near the river Teith, Stirlingshire.
Fortunately a few skulls from Scottish tumuli and cists are preserved in the Museums of the Scottish Antiquaries and of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society.
The cists measured internally four and a half feet in length, and lay north and south.
Edinburgh Phrenological Museum found on the farm of Stonelaws, East-Lothian, where a number of rude primitive cists have been exposed in the course of agricultural operations.
Mr. Brown, conceiving the position of the bodies to prove the introduction of Christian sepulchral rites, supposes these cists to have belonged to the Christians of Romanized Britain, before the Saxon invasion.
Reference has been made in a former chapter to the finding of stone cists and cinerary urns as the modern city extended over the suburban fields which lay beyond the old North Loch.
All of thesecists which are accessible had been opened and plundered before my visit, but there yet remain a few which are still intact and would repay examination and study.
A marked feature of the whole series is the existence here and there of small, often inaccessible, stone cists of masonry plastered to the side of the rocky cliff like swallows' nests.
In one of the cists were three of these buttons, 2 inches in diameter, described as of cannel coal; and in another was an iron javelin-head.
Both in cistsor graves, and in the remains of ancient circular habitations, have numerous hammer-stones and pestles been found, associated with various other articles manufactured from stone and bone.
In both cists the body lay as in the two last-mentioned graves; one contained a sharp-edged shallow bowl of red ware.
The cists are short coffins, about 3 feet in length, made of a coarse and porous red ware, and are generally without lids.
These cists were found at Ballas both in "stairway" tombs and in open Neolithic graves.
The cists are plain circular boxes some ten inches diameter by fourteen inches high; one of these is decorated by simple circles and another has crossed rods of "reel and bead," with applied small panels of chariots and horses.
These English coffins and sepulchralcists are mostly in the British Museum and at Colchester.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "cists" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
