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The tribes of Peru are said to have adored great snakes in the pre-Inca days; and in Chile the Araucanians made a serpent figure in their deluge myth. Among the Dravidians a cobra which is accidentally killed is burned like a human being; no one would kill one intentionally; the serpent-god's image is carried in an annual procession by a celibate priestess.
My father told me, too, that he did not wish the things to be sold." This was the end of the writing. Having read it I examined the dress. It was of a sort that I had never seen before, though experts to whom I have shown it say that it is certainly South American of a very early date, and like the ornaments, probably pre-Inca Peruvian.
The shelters may have been built by the herdsmen of the Incas. Anyhow, those on the hills west of Parinacochas had not been used for a long time. Nasca, which is not very far away to the northwest, was the center of one of the most artistic pre-Inca cultures in Peru. It is famous for its very delicate pottery. Our third camp was on the south side of the lake.
Until then I suggest as a possible working hypothesis that we have at Piquillacta the remains of a pre-Inca city; that its chiefs and people cultivated the Lucre Basin and its tributaries; that as a community they were a separate political entity from the people of Cuzco; that the ruler of the Cuzco people, perhaps an Inca, finally became sufficiently powerful to conquer the people of the Lucre Basin, and removed the tribes which had occupied Piquillacta to a distant part of his domain, a system of colonization well known in the history of the Incas; that, after the people who had built and lived in Piquillacta departed, no subsequent dwellers in this region cared to reoccupy the site, and its aqueduct fell into decay.
Three square miles are covered by these ruins, whose walls were made of immense blocks of stone most accurately fitted together, thus giving evidence of the great skill in stone-cutting possessed by the pre-Inca people. The Inca rulers had beautiful palaces and other edifices on some of the islands.
Forced by their climate to seek comfort in the amount and thickness of their apparel, they have developed an excessive modesty in regard to bodily exposure which is in striking contrast to people who live on the warm sands of the South Seas. Inca sculptors and potters rarely employed the human body as a motif. Tiahuanaco is pre-Inca, yet even here the images are clothed.
Forty or fifty very primitive dwellings had been at one time huddled together here in a position which could easily be defended. We found among the ruins a few crude potsherds and some bits of obsidian. There was nothing about the ruins of the little hill village to give any indication of Inca origin. Probably it goes back to pre-Inca days. No one could tell us anything about it.
In an article on the buried wall, Dr. Bowman came to the conclusion that "the wall is pre-Inca, that its relations to alluvial deposits which cover it indicate its erection before the alluvial slope in which it lies buried was formed, and that it represents the earliest type of architecture at present known in the Cuzco basin." Dr.
American Journal of Science, XXXIV, 12-16, July, 1912. Illus. Isaiah Bowman: The Geologic Relations of the Cuzco Remains. American Journal of Science, XXXIII, No. 196, 306-325, April, 1912. Illus. A Buried Wall at Cuzco and its Relation to the Question of a Pre-Inca Race. Ibid., XXXIV, No. 204, 497-509, December, 1912. Illus. The Cañon of the Urubamba.
Piqui means "flea"; llacta means "town, city, country, district, or territory." Was this "The Territory of the Fleas" or was it "Flea Town"? And what was its name in the days of the Incas? Was the old name abandoned because it was considered unlucky? Whatever the reason, it is a most extraordinary fact that we have here the evidences of a very large town, possibly pre-Inca, long since abandoned.
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