ARCHEOLOGICAL RESEARCHES IN ARGENTINA AND BOLIVIA. 577 



was a rectangular opening large enough for a man just to manage to 

 creep through. A couple of wallecl-up grottoes of a similar character 

 to this one were investigated by me, Ijut they proved to l)e empty, and 

 their object is a puzzle to me. Ambrosetti has described a grotto of 

 the kind, but he, too. is nnal)le to arrive at any satisfactory explana- 

 tion of the use to which they were put, although he is inclined to con- 

 sider them emptied graves. 



Near the ruined city just mentioned I came upon an urn of burnt 

 clay deposited in the ground and containing the dried-up corpse of a 

 child with a deformed head. The mouth of the urn Avas covered with 

 a clay plate turned upside down. The child had its sandals buried 

 with it and a rattle, consisting of the frnit of the Jughois ausfraJis 

 that grows in Chaco. A clay dish, containing some corncobs and a 

 couple of bowls of pumpkin rind, had also been deposited in the urn. 

 Beneath a projecting slab of rock, quite close to the above-described 

 grave, I came upon another, containing several skeletons and numer- 

 ous objects, as a clay vessel, a bowl of pumpkin rind, a wooden spoon, 

 small spindle whorls of wood, an implement in the shape of a knife of 

 some hard wood, a bar of wood with remnants of a fiber tie attached. 

 The Chorotes Indians have an implement which they use for carrying 

 fish about in and which in appearance exactly resembles this; iurther, 

 a club or mallet, a diminutive club, a bow, a miniatnre bow, an ax 

 handle, a miniature ax handle, a square slab of palm wood, and a bag 

 of leather. This bag contained bars of wood that show evident 

 traces of having been employed in kindling a fire. A more detailed 

 acconnt of the procedure, as observed among the present-day Chaco 

 Indians, I propose to give in my lecture upon the Chorotes. In the 

 same grave I further found a well-preserved sandal of almost the 

 same type as those used now in the Puna ; small leather bags, contain- 

 ing red, yellow, and green pigments; implements of copper; a thin 

 sheet of copper; an interesting implement of cop|)er (pi. viii. fig. 3), 

 and a whetstone. 



Adjacent to those objects, Avhich are of pure Indian origin, I also 

 found a wind instrument made of cow horn, and the remains of a 

 small knife of iron with a wooden handle. These two articles prove 

 that the ruined city at Casabindo was still inhabited at the period of 

 the Conquista. 



At Cangrejillos, in the most northerly part of the l*una, I came 

 upon a dwelling jilace of considerable size with numerous remains 

 of stone huts. Here Avas found, among other things, a stone ax of 

 exactly the same type as the Casabindo axes. At Chani, too, in South 

 Puna, I came u]K)n remains of large-sized villages, one of them at a 

 height of nearly .5,000 meters above the sea. At the topmost sunniiit 

 of the same mountain, at 0,100 meters elevation above the sea, my com- 

 gM 1904 37 



