Illustrations from "Antigüedades Peruanas" on Flickr

An interesting new development in the 'digitization' of books is reported in a recent post by BibliOdyssey, one of particular interest to our readers.

Sixty-two plates from Antigüedades Peruanas (1851) by Rivera and Tschudi have been uploaded to flickr and are freely available for researchers and admirers of this gorgeously illustrated work. (For those nearer to the Goldwater Library, you can also consult the original: YH R62a SpecColl-Folio)

As peakay of BibliOdyssey glosses it,

In the 1830s and 1840s, Peruvian museum curator Mariano Eduardo de Rivero and Swiss naturalist Dr Johann Jakob von Tschudi undertook a survey of all known relics, ruins, records, bones, artefacts and artworks relating to the pre-Columbian civilisations of Peru.

The resultant 1851 book, 'Antigüedades Peruanas', was a thorough and critical archaeological, ethnographic and anthropological review for its time, although their conclusions about, for instance, racial groupings have been superseded.

A digitized version of the English-language translation (1855), which is less lavishly illustrated, is currently freely available through the Internet Archive.

This carries on the continuing work of BibliOdyssey to highlight historic illustrations available on the web. Previous posts include portraits of Native North American chiefs, McKenney and Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1836-1844), Guaman Poma's Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno, and Captain James Cook's Voyage to the Pacific Ocean of 1784.