1892.] "1 [Brinton. 



classical, and was adopted by the missionaries as representing the 

 language in its purest and most ancient form. In it the drama of 

 Ollania was composed, which is justly regarded as one of the finest 

 productions of American aboriginal literature. 



The identification of the Calchaqui dialect of Tucuman with a 

 patois of the Kechua would settle a vexed question in American 

 ethnography and archeology. The language and the nation of the 

 Calchaquis have long since disappeared ; but their material relics, 

 in the shape of well-constructed walls of dressed stones, tombs of 

 the same material, ornaments and images in copper and gold, and 

 handsomely decorated jars of earthenware, still remain in sufficient 

 abundance to testify to a condition of culture among them rivaling 

 that of the Kechuas of the western slope of the Cordilleras.* 



The learned traveler, Von Tschudi, imagined that their tongue 

 was the modern Atacameno, and that these sparse inhabitants of 

 the desert were descendants of refugee Calchaquis. f But there is 

 no actual evidence to this effect. 



Florentine Ameghino, who has done so much for our knowledge 

 of the Argentine Republic, claims the Calchaqui as a dialect of the 

 Aymara tongue of Bolivia ;J and the two latest writers on the sub- 

 ject, S. A. Lafone Quevedo and Dr. H. von Ihering, are equally 

 at issue in their opinions. The latter insists that the Calchaquis 

 spoke an idiom wholly different from either Kechua or Aymara ;§ 

 while the former argues that this extinct tongue was " not exactly 

 Kechuan, but not altogether distinct " from it, and was a mongrel 

 dialect made up of Kechuan, Abiponian and Guaranian elements. || 



When we turn to the old authorities the point is by no means 

 cleared up. The first and best who states anything definite is the 

 Jesuit missionary, Alonso de Barzana (sometimes written Barcena), 

 whose letter from "Asuncion del Paraguay," dated Septembers, 

 1594, gives some pertinent particulars. He writes: "The most 

 widely extended languages (in Tucuman) are the Caca, the Tono- 

 cote and the Sanavirona. The Caca is spoken by the Diaguitas 

 and throughout the valley of Calchaqui, and that of Catamarca, 

 and in most of the district of Nueva Rioja. Nearly all the towns 



* See authorities quoted in my work, The American Race, pp. .319 seq. 

 t Reisen in Siid-Amerika, Vol. v, p. 81 ; Organismus der Khetsua-Sprache, p. 71. 

 t Ameghino, quoted by Ihering. 

 'i In Das Ausland, 1891, p. 914. 



II "Notes in the Calchaqui Region," in tlie American Anthropologist, October, 1891, 

 p. 358. 



