n6 ELLIOT Smith, Distribution of Mummification. 



resin, afterwards they smoked the body and preserved it 

 in their houses reposing either in a hammock or in a 

 wooden coffin. The Muiscas, the Aleutians, the inhabi- 

 tants of Yucatan and Chiapa also embalmed the bodies of 

 their kings, of their chiefs, and of their priests by methods 

 similar to those just described, with modifications varying 

 from tribe to tribe. Reutter acknowledges as the source of 

 most of his information the memoirs of Bauwenns, entitled 

 " Inhumation et Cremation," and Parcelly, " Etude His- 

 torique et Critique des Embaumements "; but most of it 

 has clearly been obtained from Yarrow's great monograph 

 (106). Alone amongst the people of the New World who 

 practised embalming the Incas employed it not only for 

 their kings, chiefs and priests, but also for the population 

 in general. These people were not confined to Peru, but 

 dwelt also in Bolivia, in Equador, as well as in a part of 

 Chili and of the Argentine. Mummified bodies were 

 placed in monuments called Chullpas. According to De 

 Morcoy these Chullpas were constructed of unbaked brick 

 and were sometimes built in the form of a truncated pyra- 

 mid, twenty to thirty feet high, in other cases simple mau- 

 solea of a simple monolith. The burial chamber inside 

 them was square and as many as a dozen mummies might 

 be buried in a single one. The bodies were sharply flexed 

 and were placed in a sitting position. An interesting and 

 curious fact about these mummies, or at any rate those 

 from Upper Peru, was that all of them presented on the 

 forehead or on the occiput a circle composed of small 

 holes through the wall of the cranium, which had probably 

 been used for evacuating the brain and for the introduction 

 of preservative substances. 



Yarrow (106) refers to the fact that the Indians of the 

 North-West coast and the Aleutian Islands also embalm 

 their dead. This, like the practice of tattooing (Buckland, 



