NO. l8 ANTHROPOLOGICAL WORK IN PERU HRDLICKA 5 I 



over by treasure hunters, has to this day received scarcely any 

 scientific attention. 



While visiting the ruins of Chan-Chan themselves, one is struck 

 by the enormous labor and expense undergone by the excavators 

 hunting for gold ; and the fancies of many an inhabitant in the valley 

 still dwell upon hidden treasure. Also, to one who has seen them 

 before, the fact is sadly apparent that these ruins are undergoing a 

 gradual decadence. I he bas-relief palace was revisited. The figures 

 on its walls, stamped in resistant adobe, and which were still beauti- 

 fully clear three years ago, are to-day already blurred by the action 

 of the elements ; a few years more and they will be so much shape- 

 less dry mud, and not a cast or a fragment of them exist anywhere 

 in a museum. Similar examples of the ravages of time could be 

 multiplied in this great city. 



The cemeteries of the Mochc J r alley are now evidently almost 

 exhausted ; but burials are said to still occur in the sand hillocks 

 from Moche to Salaverry. The burial grounds about the huaca 

 of the Moon have been thoroughly dug over and seem also to 

 be quite exhausted. The excavations in the huge adobe pile which 

 began a few years ago under the direction of the then prefect of 

 Trujillo and another high public official, Dr. Portugal, have 

 evidently been carried somewhat further, but so far as learned 

 without adding much to the results of the first digging. The great 

 huaca of the Sun has been injured no further. Undisturbed burials 

 doubtless still exist about and on, as well as in, this immense struc- 

 ture. A skeleton of a woman, which the writer secured, has been 

 recently dug out from a small flat near the top. 



The skeletal material examined or gathered from all these places 

 duplicates, as already indicated, that from the valley of the Chicama, 

 and offers similar pathological conditions. The four principal 

 classes of lesions found in the Chan-Chan region include symmetric 

 osteoporosis in the young ; the " mushroom-head " femur ; other signs 

 of arthritis ; and exostoses in the external part of the auditory me- 

 atus. Besides these there were met with a few cases of more or less 

 localized periostitis or osteoperiostitis, one of a destructive bone 

 lesion or tumor, and a few fractures and dislocations. 



IX. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 



During his late expedition to Peru, the writer examined approxi- 

 mately 4,800 crania and a very large quantity of other bones of the 

 skeleton. This material belonged in a large part to the coast region, 



