Page:Isaiah Bowman - Desert Trails of Atacama (1924).pdf/349

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Habitability of Puna in the Past
327

exchange only food and coca. If the owner has no immediate interest in a given valley, a shepherd in his service may raise llamas there. [tts seldom that the shepherd obtains money at the end of the year when the account is settled, generally only a few soles or nothing at all; and some of the shepherds are in debt to the proprietor.

On the Romania estate (Finca Cayrani) in the Cayrani val- ley west of Lake Titicaca, to which also the foregoing applics, there are fifteen families of shepherds, and cach family con- sists of about five persons. Before the estate was purchased there were but four or five families in the territory included init. A first change in the economic system and also in mode of life under the first white governors had brought about the abandonment of the terraces and an actual diminution of the population. The reverse movement is illustrated in this sig- nificant example, in which development of the pastoral indus- try is seen to have brought about an actual increase in population, A further application is considered in the following chapter.