River Clay Research Articles

Research Items

The Campas Indians, East Peru.—Some notes on the culture of the Campas Indians of eastern Peru are given by Prof. Morris G. Caldwell and Mr. John Calhoun in the Scientific Monthly for March. An area covering several thousand square miles of jungle and mountainous land and intersected by several tributaries of the upper Amazon is characterised by a common culture sufficiently uniform to justify the name of ‘the Campas Culture-area’. It extends from the Pachitea River south to the Mantaro, and from the Ucanali westward to a line from Jauja to Huanaco. The Indians possess a well-developed culture, though it appears to be retarded. They use bamboo arrows three feet long, tipped with a sharpened palmwood head sixteen inches long. Four small prongs encircle the point to catch in the flesh. Blunt hardwood heads are used for killing small birds. Fish arrows have three prongs. The bow is of palmwood five feet long. A hunting axe of dull porous stone hafted on a two-foot wooden handle is used. The principal means of transportation is by canoe—a dugout about thirty-five feet long and five feet wide. It is made from palm-wood by the use of axe and fire. Pottery jars are made from the yellow river clay; they are used for carrying water, fruit berries, etc. Garments are made from cotton which grows wild, and are often decorated with feathers, bunches of bone, seeds, nuts, toes of small animals, and bones of small birds and monkeys. The dress is a slip-over garment without sleeves and a poncho. They chew coca leaf and have an intoxicating liquor made from yucca root chewed by the old women.

Is the White River Tertiary an æolian Formation?

WHEN the Cenozoic of the Great Plains of western North America was explored in the fifties and sixties, the theory was formulated that it was deposited as sediment in a succession of vast fresh-water lakes. This view was generally held until the recent explorations, especially under auspices of the United States Geological Survey, which have caused it to be considerably modified. The Loup Fork has been shown to be largely a flood-plain deposit, the Pleistocene chiefly Aeolian; and Mr. Darton has lately traced an extensive system of river deposits overlying the White River clays. The main body of the White River formation, consisting of fine-grained calcareous clay, or chalk, with intercalated beds and lenses of sandstone, usually of limited extent and in subordinate amount, has, I believe, been universally considered lacustrine. There are some very serious difficulties, stratigraphic and paleontologic, in the way of this theory, and observations in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, during the last two summers, suggested to the writer another view, which appears to do away with these difficulties.