1895,] Archeology and Ethnology. 189 
feature of these graves seems to prove one of the statements made by 
Cieza de Leon in his account of the Civil Wars in Peru. According 
to him the natives of this northern region were in the habit of sacrific- 
ing at their burials and of throwing the remains of the sacrifice into the 
grave. In excavating I found the soil above the graves thickly 
mingled with charcoal, burnt bones, ashes and other refuse. In addi- 
tion to this refuse I also encountered numerous white shells, both bi- 
valve and spiral, in the sand, and the entire surface of the necropolis is 
lightly covered with similar shells which have prebably been washed 
out by the rains. As it is to the constant occurrence of the small white 
shell in the graves and other remains of this region that I wish to draw 
attention, I shall omit here any description of the graves themselves. 
In the Parifias Valley the ruins are less elaborate in character. At 
the mouth of this river, close by the sea, is a large artificial mound 
about an acre in extent and thirty-five feet high, filled with bones and 
fragments of coarse pottery. Occasionally it is possible to find a rough 
pot or olla of burnt clay. Close to this mound are several smaller ones 
of similar character. All of these, including the great mound, are cov- 
ered on the surface with the white shells. Throughout the valley, 
wherever natural elevations have been used as burial places, these 
shells again occur and the pottery of the graves is of the same low 
order. Ruins of adobe walls, sometimes buried several feet below the 
present level of the valley, are also to be found at several places along 
the Parifias River. : 
There are in the desert itself three or four wells in the neighborhood 
of which are buried ancient walls. Associated with these walls we in- 
variably find some natural elevation, containing bones and pieces of 
pottery, covered with the shells as in the-Parifias Valley. Everything 
seems to indicate that these ruins at the wells and along the Parifias 
belong to much earlier epoch than those which exist in the valley of 
the Chira. 
In the very heart of the desert, however, I found remains of an ‘en- 
tirely different order. These are situated about twenty-five miles 
south-west of Point Parifias four miles from the sea shore. At this 
point for several square miles the plain is crowded with irregular 
mounds, some forty or fifty feet in height, composed entirely of white 
bivalve shells slightly mixed with sand. These might be taken for 
natural formations were in not that each contains a central core which 
is filled with charcoal, burnt shells and other signs of fire. Owing to 
my work in other directions I was not able to devote much time to 
these mounds. Although repeated digging revealed neither bones nor 
