For many students and teachers who read Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, one of the most striking or disturbing passages in the text may be the description of Jefferson's experiments as an archaeologist, in Query XI, “Aborigines.” Native American burial mounds, or “Barrows . . . are to be found all over this country” of Virginia, he wrote. Local legends offered various accounts of which, why, or how many individuals were buried beneath these mounds, and so “There being one of these in my neighbourhood, I wished to satisfy myself whether any, and which of these opinions were just. For this purpose I determined to open and examine it thoroughly. It was situated on the low grounds of the Rivanna, about two miles above its principal fork,” within the modern city of Charlottesville, but also near the site of the Monacan town of Monasickapanough. Although archaeology as a science had not yet developed by 1780, Jefferson nonetheless described in great detail the size and shape of the barrow, and the depth and arrangement of the bones he found in it. His systematic description of “part of the jaw of a child, which had not yet cut its teeth” employed anatomical terminology and reads much like a modern archaeological monograph: “The processes, by which it was articulated to the temporal bones, were entire: and the bone itself firm to where it had been broken off, which, as nearly as I could judge, was about the place of the eye-tooth.” Here as elsewhere in the Notes, Jefferson was trying to demonstrate scientific methods of inquiry and a learned vocabulary that would place him in the company of British and French anatomists such as John Hunter and Louis Jean Marie Daubenton, whom he had already cited in Query VI in writing of the elephant or mammoth bones found in the Ohio Valley.