The Andes of Southern Peru: Geographical Reconnaissance Along the Seventy-Third Meridian

The Andes of Southern Peru: Geographical Reconnaissance Along the Seventy-Third Meridian
ISBN-10
1330416937
ISBN-13
9781330416938
Category
Science
Pages
432
Language
English
Published
2015-06-26
Publisher
Forgotten Books
Author
Isaiah Bowman

Description

Excerpt from The Andes of Southern Peru: Geographical Reconnaissance Along the Seventy-Third Meridian The geographic work of the Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911 was essential a reconnaissance of the Peruvian Andes along the 73rd meridian. The route led form the tropical plains of the lower Urubamba southward over lofty snow-covered passes to the dessert coast at Camana. The strong climate and topographic contrast and the varied human life which region contains are of geographic interest chiefly because they present to many and such clear cases of environmental control within short distances. Though we speak of "isolated" mountain communities in the Andes, it is only 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. My division of the Expedition undertook to make a contour map of the two-hundred-mile stretch of mountain country between Abancay and the Pacific coast, and a great deal of detailed geographic and physiographic work had to be sacrificed to insure the completion of the survey. Camp sites, forage, water and, above all, strong beasts for the topographer's difficult and excessively lofty station brought daily problems that were always serious and sometimes critical. I was so deeply interested interested in the progress of the topographic map that whenever it came to a choice of plans the map and not the geography was first considered. The effect upon my work was distribute it with little regard to the demands of the problems, but I cannot regret this in view of the great value of the maps. Mr. Kai Hendriksen did splendid work in putting through two hundred miles of plane-tabling in two months under conditions of extreme difficulty. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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