THE 



AMERICAN JOURNALOFSCIENCE 



[FOURTH SERIES.] 



Art. XLIII. — A Buried Wall at Cuzco and Its Relation to 

 the Question of a pre-Inca Race (Yale Peruvian Expedi- 

 tion, 1911) • by Isaiah Bowman. 



During- the summer of 1911 the Yale Peruvian Expedition 

 spent some time studying the surroundings of Cuzco, and in a 

 ravine* on the outskirts of the city came upon a group of facts 

 in relation to a buried wall that appear to have a large signifi- 

 cance. The wall belongs to the older type of rougher and 

 apparently more primitive architecture which students of 

 Peruvian archeology have for some time been inclined to 

 regard as pre-Inca, though the belief has heretofore not 

 depended upon secure evidence. It appears that we now have 

 a fairly safe basis for concluding that the wall is pre-Inca, that 

 its relations to alluvial deposits which cover it indicate its 

 erection before the alluvial slope in which it lies buried was 

 formed, and that it represents the earliest type of architecture 

 at present known in the Cuzco basin. 



The wall extends along the border of a ravine on the south- 

 western edge of Cuzco, BM 8 -BM 10 , fig. 1. The detailed topo- 

 graphic features are brought out in figs. 2 to 5. The lower 

 end, BM 10 , fig. 1, is now almost entirely uncovered ; the upper 

 and middle portions are deeply buried in coarse but well-strat- 

 ified gravel of prehistoric though postglacial age. A cross- 

 section of the alluvium in which the wall lies buried, fig. 2, 

 gives one a clear idea of its peculiar position. The ravine 

 itself is relatively new, fig. 5, and we were told that it had 

 been opened, at first artificially, about ten or twenty years ago. 



* It was in a neighboring ravine that the vertebrate remains were found 

 which have been described in earlier papers in this Journal, vol. xxxiii, 

 pp. 297-333, 1912. See these papers also for a preliminary statement on the 

 buried wall and related facts. 



Am. Jour. Sci.— Fourth Series, Vol. XXXIV, No. 204.— December, 1912. 

 33 



