eople
devoted themselves to the worship of huacas ... each village had its
huaca. The cult assumed such proportions under Ccapac Yupanqui that he
exclaimed: 'How many false gods are there in the land, to my sorrow and
the misfortune of my vassals! When shall we see these evils remedied?' "

At the same time we find that clay or wooden figures continued to be
employed evidently as a method of keeping an accurate register of the
population. In the capital, one building held duplicates of all the huacas
throughout the land. When a new province was conquered the Inca carried
its principal huaca to Cuzco. One or more living representatives of the
conquered tribe, wearing its characteristic dress, were obliged to reside
in the capital. In ancient Mexico these "living images of the gods" are
one of the most striking features of the native civilization and have been
persistently misunderstood, especially by modern authorities. As these
"living gods" are specially treated in the "Lyfe of the Indians," I shall
merely point out here that small clay portraits or effigies of persons
were made in Mexico at certain stages of an individual's life and also
after his death. These seem to have been employed for statistical
purposes.

In Mexico and Peru large numbers of small images were preserved in each
household and were under the charge of its chief or "older brother," who
was obliged to guard and render account of them. Of course the Spanish
conquerors took it for granted that all of these were idols and, in their
ignorance, destroyed them unmercifully. Once the native system of tribal
organization is understood, it becomes evident that an accurate register
of all members of a tribe was of utmost importance. By means of a group of
more or less skillfully-modelled figures or heads the size of a family
could be ascertained at a glance by the government recorder. In the light
of this recognition it seems more than probable that the immense numbers
of small clay heads of various kinds, found in the "street of the dead" at
the base of the great pyramids of Teotihuacan, and elsewhere, indicate
that, in these localities, a periodical and official registration of
deaths was carefully carried on. This assumption is fully corroborated by
the conclusions I reached, in 1886, after making a minute study of a large
number of terra-cotta heads(21) and ascertaining that numbers of them were
portraits of dead persons. The above inference is, moreover,