On this plain, with its
underlying red-clay beds, I imagine that the Indians manufactured
their earthen vessels; and that, during some violent earthquake,
the sea broke over the beach, and converted the plain into a
temporary lake, as happened round Callao in 1713 and 1746. The
water would then have deposited mud containing fragments of pottery
from the kilns, more abundant at some spots than at others, and
shells from the sea. This bed with fossil earthenware stands at
about the same height with the shells on the lower terrace of San
Lorenzo, in which the cotton-thread and other relics were embedded.
Hence we may safely conclude that within the Indo-human period
there has been an elevation, as before alluded to, of more than
eighty-five feet; for some little elevation must have been lost by
the coast having subsided since the old maps were engraved. At
Valparaiso, although in the 220 years before our visit the
elevation cannot have exceeded nineteen feet, yet subsequently to
1817 there has been a rise, partly insensible and partly by a start
during the shock of 1822, of ten or eleven feet. The antiquity of
the Indo-human race here, judging by the eighty-five feet rise of
the land since the relics were embedded, is the more remarkable, as
on the coast of Patagonia, when the land stood about the same
number of feet lower, the Macrauchenia was a living beast; but as
the Patagonian coast is some way distant from the Cordillera, the
rising there may have been slower than here.
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