188 The American Naturalist. [February, 
ARCHEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY. 
Discovery of Shell Mounds in Chira Valley, Peru.—It was 
my good fortune, during the last four years, to discover in the Chira 
Valley in the northern Part of Peru, a vast field of antique remains 
hitherto unknown to the scientific world. The Chira River which is 
the most northernly of the important coast streams running from the 
Andes to the Pacific, is situated about one hundred and fifty miles from 
the frontier of Ecuador, and nearly six hundred miles to the north of 
the great Ancon necropolis, recently so exhaustively studied by Reiss 
and Stiibel. Between the Chira and Ancon are two fields already well 
known—one the great Chimer and Trujillo and the other near Chim- 
bote in the Santa Valley-—Trujillo lies some 225 miles to the south of 
the Chira. 
Fifty or sixty miles north of the Chira is a smaller valley called the 
Parifias. Between the two is a desert region extending inland to the 
La Brea Mountains, a distance of thirty miles. These two valleys and 
the intervening territory, an area of 1800 square miles, comprised my 
field of work. The exact locality may readily be determined upon any 
map of South America as it embraces Point Parifias which is the most 
westerly Cape of the Southern Continent. 
It was among the ruins and graves of the Chira Valley that I gath- 
ered the Collection of Antiquities now deposited in the Museum of the 
University of Pennsylvania. These ruins and graves occupy as arule 
all the untillable land on the northern side of the valley from the town 
of Sullana to the mouth of the River, a distance of forty or fifty miles. 
The ruins are unique among those I saw in Peru. They lie in groups 
four or five miles apart and consist of terraced temple platforms of 
three stories, built of clay reinforced with conical shaped adobes. 
The whole edifice is about three hundred feet in length and breadth at 
the base and seventy-five feet in heighth. Adjoining these pyramidal 
structures are always found extensive traces of adobe walls, doubtless 
the remains of the foundations of priestly dwellings, for it is fair to 
suppose that these monuments had a sacred character. At the foot of 
the ruins are arranged numerous hillocks thickly covered with small 
white bivalve shells. Under the shells the soil is full of fine ashes and 
sherds of pottery. The surrounding plain is always crowded with 
graves, often three or four tiers deep to a depth of twenty-five feet. A 
' This department is edited by H. C. Mercer, University of Pennsylvania. 
