Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

CHAPTER XXVII
INDIAN ROCK-PICTURES: ENGRAVED ROCKS ON THE
RIO NEGRO AND CASIQUIARI (COMMONLY CALLED
INDIAN PICTURE-WRITING)
[WHILE residing at Piura on the sea-coast of Peru
in 1863, and being incapacitated by illness for
outdoor work, Spruce wrote out a description of
these curious works of art illustrated by the draw-
ings he was able to make of some of them, and with
an explanation of their meaning given him by the
Indians who were with him and to whom they were
familiar. He also Oskives
his own view as to their
probable age, and as to the causes that led to their
production. In this paper he does not refer to the
best known of these Picture-writings on the rocks
of Pedra Island, near the mouth of the Rio Branco,
which are briefly described in his Journal. (See
vol. i.
p. 260.) This paper refers solely to the
examples of which he made drawings on the
Casiquiari and Uaupes rivers.]
INDIAN PICTURE-WRITING l
When I ascended the Casiquiari in December
1853, I charged my pilot, an intelligent
Indian of
1 In his Journal (1851), when describing the figures on Pedra Island (Lower
Xegro), he protested against the use of the term " picture-writing" as con-
veying the erroneous idea that they are in any sense writings or hieroglyphics.
T \\L-lve years later he uses the popular term, though showing that it is an
incorrect one.
474