24 APRIL 1915, Page 23

The great prehistoric city of Tiahnanaca, of which the ruins

lie near the @bores of Lake Titicaca, over twelve thousand feet high upon the plateau of the Andes, provides one of the most romantic and mysterious problems of archaeology. Mr. A. A. Adams uses it as the basis of an ethnical study of The Plateau Peoples of South America (George Routledge and Scuas. is. 6d. net). His object is to prove the gradual but constant deterioration, caused mainly by climatic conditions, of the inhabitants of the plateau. From the first megalithic civilization, which is thought to have flourished eleven thousand years ago, he traces the history of the country through the Aymara Empire and the astonishing bureaucracy of the Incas down to the present Bolivian Republic, of which he gives a most unflattering picture.