EXTENT OF HOLDINGS 23 



and departments at the date referred to (1877). On this basis, 

 allowing an average of five tupus (1.75 acre) for each originario, 

 since most of the land left them is poor, and three tupus (1.05 

 acre) for each agregado, the figures given in the "Revisitas in- 

 digenales" indicate the amounts of agricultural land as being 

 held by communities in the year 1877 (or the last year given) as 

 summarized in Table II. 



TABLE II EXTENT OF INDIAN COMMUNITY HOLDINGS IN 1877 

 (in acres) 



Probably at least an equal area was occupied for grazing 

 purposes. This would make the entire communal holdings 

 amount to about half a million acres. Senor Luis Crespo, 

 one of the leading Bolivian authorities in geography and statis- 

 tics, estimates that some 10,000,000 acres in the entire repub- 

 lic are suited to agriculture and that about 5,000,000 acres are 

 actually under cultivation. 22 This would indicate that about 

 one-twentieth of the land under cultivation in the republic is in 

 community holdings. Such is probably an underestimate rather 

 than an exaggeration, since the estimate of 5,000,000 acres for 

 the whole country seems excessively large, and since many 

 Indians are said to escape the land tax by evading registration 

 for the contribution territorial. 



22 Monthly Bull. Internatl. Bur. of the Amer. Republics, No. 159, Vol. 23, 1906, 

 p. 1467. 



