324 PREHISTORIC FISHING. 



Peru. — During his ten days' exploration of the ruins at Pachacamac, about 

 twenty miles south of Lima, Mr. E. Gr. Squier examined a number of tombs, of 

 one of which he gives a detailed description. It contained five desiccated human 

 bodies, namely, those of a man of middle stature, of a full-grown woman, of a 

 girl about fourteen years old, of a boy some years younger, and of an infant. 

 Having mentioned the diffei-ent wrappings shrouding the body of the man, Mr. 

 Squier continues : — " Passing around the neck, and carefully folded on the 

 knees, on which the head rested, was a net of the twisted fibre of the agave, a 

 plant not found on the coast. The threads were as fine as the finest used by our 

 fishermen, and the meshes were neatly knotted, precisely after the fashion of 

 to-day. This seems to indicate that he had been a fisherman — a conclusion 

 further sustained by finding, wrapped up in a cloth, between his feet some fishing- 

 lines of various sizes, some copper hooks, barbed like ours, and some copper 

 sinkers. "•■'■• 



I thought these articles were in the American Museum of Natural History 

 at New York, this institution having acquired Mr. Squier's collection ; but upon 

 inquiry, I was informed that they are not there, and I am thus deprived of the 

 oj^portunity of giving any additional account of them. I was particularly anxious 

 to ascertain whether the hooks really were barbed, as stated by Mr. Squier ; for 

 all Peruvian specimens of this class seen by me were unbarbed, and I cannot 

 remember having read any notice relating to barbed fish-hooks from Peru. 



There are several single copper fish-hooks in the National Museum, and, 

 moreover, two sets of angling-apparatus, which would be complete, if the rods 

 were not wanting. These articles were but lately presented by Mr. Gr. H. Hurl- 



from the city of Popayan, at which place Mr. Smith was, in conjunction with General 0. Bando, raining for 

 placer-gold in the year 1866. One of the hooks was in the possession of General Bando, and was by him exhibited 

 as a curiosity at the time of Mr. Smith's going there. Another, talcen from the bed of a river into which the 

 Guava entered, was owned by a negro, and was by him also kept for the same purpose, showing therefore that even 

 there the hoolcs were not common, and could not be obtained but by great labor in washing earth taken out many 

 feet below the surface. The first hooks, three in number, found by Mr. Smith, were taken out ten feet below the 

 river-bed. The river had, at great cost, been turned from its natural channel. Nine others were taken from a 

 bar about two miles above the place where the first three had been found. The bar was the accumulation of cen- 

 turies, and was covered by a thick growth of forest. The gold was generally distributed over the bar, and as the 

 ground promised to be remunerative, it was adjudged best to sluice it entirely away. On the bed-rock, under a 

 lime-tree fully two feet in diameter, at a depth of about fifteen feet, several more hooks were secured, and still 

 others, at a like depth, in a crevice beneath an immense boulder that weighed probably twenty tons. The accum- 

 ulated debris of the bar varied from eight to twenty feet in thickness. 



" By the people of the neighborhood they were generally believed to be the handiwork of an extinct tribe of 

 Indians, the remains of whose village were then to be seen six or seven leagues higher up, and near the source of 

 the river. They had evidently been workers in gold, as several old arrastras and mining-shafts bore proof. Their 

 graves have since been opened, and many trinkets of gold taken therefrom, lizards, fish and frogs being the 

 nio.st common devices." 



Such is the account given in the above-named newspaper. Photographs of the hooks were sent by Mr. 

 Smith ; but they arrived too late for reproduction and utilization. This very note was already in type, and had 

 to be modified to include the reference. 



» Squier : Peru ; Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas ; New York, 1877 ; p. 74. 



