The barrows continued to remain an archaeological puzzle and with a view to solve it Bloch partially excavated four of the mounds in 1904-05. In two of the mounds he found nothing of interest except that, in one he discovered a few animal bones here and there and a number of pieces of corroded iron. As noticed by Cunningham, the earth, of which most of the mounds were composed, was exceptionally stiff and hard for digging. Bloch observed that the barrows “had been built up of layers of yellow clay, a few inches in thickness with grass and leaves of trees laid between them.”

It appeared that the clay was brought from the Gandak or its tributary, some miles away from Lauriya. In the other two mounds Bloch discovered, at a depth of 6 to 12 feet from the top surface, a small deposit of burnt human bones “mixed up with charcoal, and a small gold leaf, with the figure of a standing female, stamped upon it.” The bone pieces were found to be very brittle and one of them, a piece of an upper jaw, represented a person of young age. A little below these deposits Bloch noticed a long hollow shaft running through the centre of each mound, showing that an upright wooden post had once existed here but had since been eaten away by white ants. Digging further in one of them he actually came upon, in the natural sandy soil of the area, a part of the wooden pillar itself going down below the water level. From these finds Bloch was convinced that these had some connection with the funeral rites of the people who erected them.

To be continued....