ARCHEOLOGICAL RESEARCHES IN \HC:ENTINA AND BOLIVIA. 577 



\vas a roctancfular ()])(Miin<i: ]i\v(ro ciiouiih for a man just to manap^e to 

 creep throiioh. A couple of walled-np orottoes of a siiiiilar cdiaracter 

 to this one were invest i<ra ted by nie, but they proved to be empty, and 

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

 the kind, but he, too, is unable to arrive at an}'- 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-np corpse of a 

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

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

 with it and a rattle, consisting of the fruit of the Jvc/lans mistralis 

 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 Avooden 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 wdiich they use for carrying 

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

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

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

 of leather. This l)ag contained bars of wood that show evident 

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

 account 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 w^ell-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 copper (pi. viii. fig. 3), 

 and a whetstone. 



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

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

 Somali 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 Puna, I came 

 upon a dwelling place of considerable size with numerous remains 

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

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

 Puna, I came upon remains of large-sized villages, one of them at a 

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

 of the same mountain, at 6,100 meters elevation above the sea, my com- 

 SM 1904 37 



