| Transcriber's note: The etext attempts to replicate the printed book as closely as possible. Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected. The spellings of names, places and Spanish words used by the author have not been corrected or modernized by the etext transcriber. The footnotes have been moved to the end of the text body. The images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break for ease of reading. |
THE ANDES OF SOUTHERN
PERU
GEOGRAPHICAL RECONNAISSANCE ALONG THE
SEVENTY-THIRD MERIDIAN
BY
ISAIAH BOWMAN
Director of the American Geographical Society
PUBLISHED FOR
THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
OF NEW YORK
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1916
Copyright, 1918
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N.J.
TO
C. G. B.
PREFACE
THE geographic work of the Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911 was essentially a reconnaissance of the Peruvian Andes along the 73rd meridian. The route led from the tropical plains of the lower Urubamba southward over lofty snow-covered passes to the desert coast at Camaná. The strong climatic and topographic contrasts and the varied human life which the region contains are of geographic interest chiefly because they present so many and such clear cases of environmental control within short distances. Though we speak of “isolated” mountain communities in the Andes, it is only in a relative sense. The extreme isolation felt in some of the world’s great deserts is here unknown. It is therefore all the more remarkable when we come upon differences of customs and character in Peru to find them strongly developed in spite of the small distances that separate unlike groups of people.