Note 1301 — Chapter IV · (continued 2)

This superb work was issued at Berlin and London with German and English texts. The English title reads, Peruvian Antiquities: the Necropolis of Ancon in Peru. A contribution to our knowledge of the culture and industries of the empire of the Incas. Being the results of excavations made on the spot. Translated by A. H. Keane. With the aid of the general administration of the royal museums of Berlin (Berlin, 1880-87); in three folio volumes, with 119 colored and plain plates. The divisions are: 1. The Necropolis and its graves. 2. Garments and textiles. 3. Ornaments, utensils, earthenware; evolution of ornamentation, with treatises by L. Wittmack on the plants found in the graves; R. Virchow on the human remains, and A. Nehring on the animals. [A few of the plates are reproduced in black and white in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen. The authors represent that the graveyard of Ancon, an obscure place lying near the coast, north of Lima, was probably the burial-place of a poor people; but its obscurity has saved it to us while important places have been ransacked and destroyed. The reader will be struck with the richness of the woven materials, which are so strikingly figured in the plates. On this point Stübel published in Dresden in 1888, as a part of the Festschrift of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the “Verein für Erdkunde,” a paper Ueber altperuanische Gewebemuster und ihnen analoge Ornamente der altklassischen Kunst (Dresden, 1888). Some of the plates in the larger work impress one with the great variety of ornamenting skill. The collection formed by John H. Blake from an ancient cemetery on the bay of Chacota, now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Mass., is described in the Reports of that institution, xi. 195, 277. Reference may also be made to B. M. Wright’s Description of the collection of gold ornaments from the “huacas,” or graves of some aboriginal races of the northwestern provinces of South America, belonging to Lady Brassey (London, 1885).—Ed.]