AMERIND DIVISION 59 



the Incas. To-day the descendants of the Chimu are called the ' Yuncas,' 

 and live along the coast from 5 degrees to 10 degrees south latitude. In the 

 provinces of Catamarca, Tucuman, and Salta of the Argentine lived a civilized 

 race, now extinct, called the ' Calchaqui,' who were also subdued by the Incas. 



The Incas are possibly the descendants of the unknown peoples of the early 

 civilizations who, defeated by the Quichuan peoples, fled into the Apurimac 

 region, whence they subsequently issued forth to subdue their ancient con- 

 querors. Their rule was very despotic, and their subject peoples were very 

 carefully divided into tens, fifties, five hundreds, and ten thousands, the 

 last being under a chief taking orders direct from the Inca. Their system 

 was very artificial, and absolutely without any freedom for the individual, 

 and hence the easy Spanish conquest. They possessed no written language, 

 everything being preserved by oral information handed down from genera- 

 tion to generation. 



Except in the Andes, there are no civilizations in South America, and the 

 peoples whom we now come to consider were all backward in their culture 

 evolution at the time of the advent of the Spaniards. They are the members 

 of the linguistic families called ' Arawak,' 'Tapuya,' 'Tupi,' and ' Carib,' 

 in the regions lying east of the Cordilleras as far south as the Rio de la Plata, 

 while farther south lived the Pampeans and Fuegians, with whom we are not 

 concerned. 



The Arawak would appear to be the original inhabitants of the low-lying 

 lands to the east of the Cordilleras, and it is possible that they originally 

 spread to the north-east, the east, and the south-east from a primeval home 

 on the eastern slopes of the Bolivian Cordilleras; but their most important 

 migration appears to have been that to the north-east, where they populated 

 the, until then, vacant valleys of the Orinoco and Amazon, especially along 

 the north bank and up the Xingu River. In the east of Brazil, from the 

 Xingu River to the coast, lived the Tapuya, who were probably the aborigines 

 of these regions. They include the Ges and Botocudos of to-day, of which 

 the latter are degraded savages. 



The Caribs, according to Van der Stein, took their origin about the sources 

 of the Xingu and Parana tiga Rivers, where the Caribbean tribes called 

 ' Bakairi ' and * Nahuqua ' live. From this source they travelled, probably 

 by water, along the Amazon, meeting with the Arawak, till they reached its 

 mouth, when they turned northwards, probably because they met the Tupi 

 people coming from the south, and spread through Guiana to Venezuela, 

 where their progress was checked by the civilized Chibchas, though some of 

 them entered the valley of the Magdalena River. From the north of South 

 America they proceeded to the Antilles, into which they were still migrating 

 when stopped by the arrival of the Spaniards. 



The Tupi people had their primitive home, according to Haddon, in the 

 northern portion of the basin of the Rio de la Plata, down which they spread 

 to the mouth, and then, migrating northwards along the coast, reached the 

 mouth of the Amazon, meeting there the Arawak and possibly the Carib 

 peoples, and, travelling westwards along the southern bank of the Amazon, 

 reached the Xingu River, up which they went, founding the Kamayura and 

 Aneta tribes in its upper basin. They went still farther westwards, forming 

 the more civilized Omagua between the Putumayo and Caqueta Rivers, and 

 the Cocama peoples at the junction of the Amazon with the Ucayali River. 



In Uruguay and Paraguay the Tupi peoples are called ' Guarani,' or 

 ' Warriors,' and hence the whole family is called the ' Tupi-Guaranian 

 family.' 



Into the races mentioned above penetrated the great Caucasic migration, 

 headed by Columbus, in the fifteenth century of our era, which, though 

 stopping the autochthonous evolution of civilization in America, introduced 

 the more highly evolved culture of the Old World at the cost of millions of 

 lives of the Amerindians. 



The Latin races of this migration have fused with the aborigines to a great 

 extent, and thus have laid the foundations of the new Latin- Amerindian races 

 which are arising to-day. 



