marine shells, sometimes though rarely single large round pebble, more
frequently short irregular layers of fine gravel, and very many pieces of
red coarse earthenware, which from their curvatures must once have formed
parts of large vessels. The earthenware is of Indian manufacture; and I
found exactly similar pieces accidentally included within the bricks, of
which the neighbouring ancient Peruvian burial-mounds are built. These
fragments abounded in such numbers in certain spots, that it appeared as if
waggon-loads of earthenware had been smashed to pieces. The broken sea-
shells and pottery are strewed both on the surface, and throughout the
whole thickness of this upper loamy mass. I found them wherever I examined
the cliffs, for a space of between two and three miles, and for half a mile
inland; and there can be little doubt that this same bed extends with a
smooth surface several miles further over the entire plain. Besides the
little included irregular layers of small pebbles, there are occasionally
very obscure traces of stratification.

At one of the highest parts of the cliff, estimated 120 feet above the sea,
where a little ravine came down, there were two sections, at right angles
to each other, of the floor of a shed or building. In both sections or
faces, two rows, one over the other, of large round stones could be
distinctly seen; they were packed close together on an artificial layer of
sand two inches thick, which had been placed on the natural clay-beds; the
round stones were covered by three feet in thickness of the loam with
broken sea-shells and pottery. Hence, before this widely spread-out bed of
loam was deposited, it is certain that the plain was inhabited; and it is
probable, from the broken vessels being so much more abundant in certain
spots than in others, and from the underlying clay being fitted for their
manufacture, that the kilns stood here.

The smoothness and wide extent of the plain, the bulk of matter deposited,