This page needs to be proofread.
Crossing the Puna de Atacama
293
have never known hitherto. If communities are not disrupted by such changes they are at least given a new character, as one after the other of the mineral products of the region and one after the other of the railways come to be developed. A geographical group that has lived an undisturbed life ever since the Conquest finds its community life reorganized, a serious matter particularly for pure Indian communities that have carried on a fixed relation with nature not merely during the past four hundred years but from time immemorial.