The Lakota, once acquired the horse, became one of the dominant units in the Northern Plains. They deposited the corpses, dressed in finery and wrapped in buffalo hides, usually above the ground, in the limbs of a tree or on a specially constructed four-poles scaffold. At the burial site food offerings ad goods were left to the deceased. It was believed that the dead person’s spirit took the spiritual essence of the objects, not their material stuff, with it as it travelled to the world of the spirits. The relatives of the deceased could return periodically to the burial and, when the body had disintegrated, the bones were gathered and buried in the earth. At that moment no visible trace was left of the corpse. Relatives mourned, mortifying themselves: women and men gashed or stabbed their legs, cut their hair, wore ragged clothing and left their faces unpainted and their bodies unornamented. During the funeral ceremony gifts were given away, both the deceased’s possessions and those of the nearer relatives. After a certain time, the community decided that the mourning had gone on long enough: they would take the mourners to a dance where their faces were painted  and they were dressed in new clothes. This behaviour marked the end of mourning and the resumption of ordinary activities. The remembrance of the dead person remained only in the memory of those who had the strictest acquaintance with him or her  (DeMallie 2001: 810; Comba 2004: 79).

Painting by Karl Bodmer showing a Lakota camp with the burial platforms on which the dead were deposited (from: Maximilian Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, during the years 1832–1834. Ackermann & Comp., London 1843–1844)

H.C. Yarrow (1880, 1881), who was the first to inquire systematically on the funerary customs of the North American Natives in some works which remain a fundamental source on this topic, was surprised above all by the habit, spread in the Plains region, of putting the bodies in trees or on scaffolds, which he describes as “aerial sepultures” (Yarrow 1881: 158).
No Flesh, an old Lakota man, reported to Walker in 1899:

“No man knows where the spirit world is. It is at the other end of the spirit way [the Milky Way]. The ancient people said it was beyond the pines. The pines are at the edge of the world. It is beyond the path of the winds. There is no cold or hunger or work in the spirit world. The spirit stays in the spirit world. It can come to the [our] world. It can talk to mankind. A  wakan man [“sacred man”, a shaman] can talk to the spirit. A spirit can talk with its friends. If a spirit talks to one, that one is in danger […] He should ask a wakan man to help him. He should do as the wakan man bids him” (Walker 1980: 117).             Platform burial photographed by Richard Throssel in 1910, near the Crow Reservation, Montana

In some of his paintings, George Catlin described large circles of buffalo skulls, inside which some human skulls were put in a row. Such monuments have been described in the same years by Prince Maximilian of Wied and have been eternalized by the Swiss painter Carl Bodmer, who accompanied the expedition (Wied 1839-41), though both of them are unable to explain the meaning of these constructions, nor why the human skulls were sometimes painted in red. What seems particularly interesting is the fact that human and animal skulls were put together, in a way were mixed together. This aspect reminds of the Native idea according to which the soul was not regarded as the unique possession of man, but was attributed as well to the animals, to the plants and even to certain objects.

Mandan funeral monument, with human skulls and buffalo skulls deposited in a circle (illustration by Karl Bodmer from: Maximilian Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, during the years 1832–1834. Ackermann & Comp., London 1843–1844)