THE "GREAT WALL OF PERU" AND OTHER AERIAL 

 PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIES BY THE SHIPPEE-JOHN- 

 SON PERUVIAN EXPEDITION ^ 



By Robert Shippee 



[With 10 plates] 



The appearance of " Peru from the Air," ^ was followed by many 

 requests for a continuation of the studies contained therein. In no 

 field have the rewards of aerial survey been greater than in arche- 

 ology, and the demand has been increasing for " more maps and more 

 air photographs," as Crawford has phrased it. To meet this demand 

 and the demands of geography were two of the chief objectives of the 

 Shippee- Johnson Peruvian expedition of 1931. The expedition 

 planned to record the most important ancient sites of Peru by 

 oblique and vertical photographs and mosaic maps. We had little 

 expectation of making really new discoveries in a country where 

 exploration has already revealed so much. We were quite unpre- 

 pared for the " Great Wall," as it has been popularly termed. 



THE GREAT WALL 



While we were still operating from the base that we had estab- 

 lished at Trujillo for the mapping of the well-known ruins of Chan- 

 Chan, we made a flight with the photographic plane inland as far as 

 the Maranon River and, on the return, circled southward around 

 Mount Huascaran and then followed the valley of the Santa River 

 to the coast. Our course was over the edge of the foothills bordering 

 the narrow upper valley of the river on the north. Johnson, co- 

 leader and photographer of the expedition, watching for photo- 

 graphic subjects, noticed what appeared to be a wall flowing up and 

 down over the ridges beneath the plane, wondered for a moment as 

 to the purpose of such a structure, decided that it was worth record- 



1 Copyright, 1932, by tbe American Geographical Society of New Yorli. Reprinted by 

 permission from the Geographical Review, vol. 22, No. 1, January, 1932. The 29 illus- 

 tratioDs which originally accompanied this article have here been reduced to 20, appearing 

 as 10 plates. 



2 Johnson, George R., and Flatt, Raye R., Peru from the Air, Amer. Geogr. Soc. Sporinl 

 Publ. No. 12, New York, 1930. 



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