` 
THE PRIMEVAL MONUMENTS OF PERU. 9 
for the poor and insignificant, and the grander and more 
elaborate monument for the rich and the powerful, as we do 
today ? 
I incline, for reasons not altogether drawn from an in- 
vestigation of this single class of monuments, to the opinion 
that the various forms of the chulpa are indices of different 
eras. I doubt if monuments were ever raised, whether rude 
or imposing, except over important persons. I believe that 
anciently as now, the common Indian, the patient servant of 
the chief or curaca of old, Fig. 6. 
as of the gobernador of our 
age, received few burial hon- 
ors. His grave was unmark- 
ed by stone or symbol. The 
chulpas probably signalize the 
graves of individuals distin- 
guished in their periods, 
upon which contemporaneous 
skill and effort were expended. 
If the monument was rude, 
it was because the people dg 
who raised it were also rude. 73€ — 
At the time it was erected Mr WT: 
the cromlech or chulpa of = 999 
Acora cost, it may be, an Chulpa, or Burial Tower, Sillustani. 
effort as great or greater than was exhausted, at a later pe- 
riod, on the elaborate and imposing towers of Sillustani. 
And, altogether, I am convinced, speaking for the present 
only in view of sepulchral monuments, that their develop- 
ment in Peru may be traced from their first and rudest form. 
up to that which prevailed at the time of the Conquest, 
preserving throughdut the same essential features. 
But it is not in the early sepulchral monuments of Peru, 
that we have absolute coincidences with the remains which 
are now accepted as among the primitive monuments of 
mankind. As we find in both Europe and Asia the rude 
AMER. NATURALIST, VOL. IV. 2 
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