The ruins at Tiahuanaco, ten or twelve miles from Lake Titicaca, are considered among the most ancient in Peru. They include stones from fifteen to twenty feet high, some cut, others rough, standing in rows. All the structures were in a very dilapidated condition when the Spaniards came, and some very large stone statues in human form were found, with stone columns. One of the most interesting monuments is the monolithic doorway shown in the cut. The opening is seventy-six inches high and thirty-eight wide. Rivero and Tschudi represent the sculptured figures in the small squares as being profiles of the human face instead of those shown in Baldwin's cut. There were several of these doorways. Several idols and some very large blocks of cut stone were dug up in 1846, and the latter used for mill-stones. The blocks are described as thirty feet long, eighteen feet wide, and six feet thick, being shaped so as to form a channel when one was placed upon another.
Doorway at Tiahuanaco.
A building on the Island of Coati, in Lake Titicaca, is shown in the cut. Rivero gives a view and plan of another large palace, consisting for the most part of a single line of low apartments built round three sides of a rectangular court, and bearing some resemblance, as Mr Baldwin remarks, to the Central American structures, except that it does not rest on a pyramidal foundation. Rock-inscriptions of the same rude class so often mentioned in the northern continent, occur also in Peru, although somewhat less frequently, so far as may be judged by the reports of explorers.
Ruin on the Island of Coati.
CONCLUSION.
The contents of the preceding pages may be sufficient to show the reader that the resemblance between the southern and northern monuments, if any resemblance exists, is very faint. The Maya and Peruvian peoples may have been one in remote antiquity; if so, the separation took place at a period long preceding any to which we are carried by the material relics of the Votanic empire, and of the most ancient epoch of the southern civilization, or even by traditional annals and the vaguest myths. There seems to be a natural tendency even among antiquarians to attribute all American civilizations to a common origin, constantly moving back the date as investigation progresses. This tendency has much in common with that which so persistently traces American civilization to the old world, old-world culture to one centre, the human race to one pair, and the first pair to a special creation, performed at a definite time and point in Asia. Be the results of the tendency referred to true or false, it is evident that superstition has contributed more than science to the zeal that has supported them.