Human Remains near Cusco, Peru. 



303 



After proceeding up the valley for more than half a mile it 

 narrowed and the east side, along which I was walking, became 

 very precipitous (fig. 4). The road had apparently recently 

 been widened and this made the bank at this place practically 

 perpendicular. About live feet above the road I saw what at 

 first looked like one of the small rocks which are freely inter- 

 spersed throughout the compact gravel of this region. Some- 



Fig. 6. 









Fig. 6. The vertebrate remains after partial excavation. The photograph 

 shows the long narrow lense of vertebrate material and the jumbled state of 

 the bones. The fallen end of the femur, in the lower left-hand corner, was 

 originally in the stratum which the other bones occupied. 



thing about it led me to examine it more closely, and I then 

 recognized that it was apparently the end of a human bone, 

 probably a femur (tig. 5). 



I was at once so impressed by the possibilities, in case it 

 should turn out to be true that this was a human bone and had 

 been buried centuries ago under seventy-five or a hundred 

 feet of gravel, that I refrained from disturbing the bone until 

 I could get the geologist and the naturalist of the Expedition 

 to witness its excavation. Professor Isaiah Bowman, who had 

 already made studies in the Central Andes, and was the geolo- 

 gist-geographer of the Expedition, was at this time only a few 

 days away making a preliminary study of the Anta basin. On 

 his return to Cuzco Professor Bowman was requested to make 

 a physiographic study of the gulch in which the human remains 

 had been found. The results of his study are presented in a 



