In the highlands near the present city of Caracas, and in the fertile valleys which surround the beautiful inland lake of Valencia to the southeast, were at the discovery a number of tribes whose names, Arbacos, Mariches, Merigotos, etc., give us no information as to their affinities. They are now extinct, and nothing of their languages has been preserved. All the more store do we set by the archæology of the district, about which valuable information has been contributed by Dr. G. Marcano.[241] He opened a number of burial mounds where the bones of the dead, after having been denuded of flesh, were interred, together with ornaments and utensils. These were in stone, bone and terra cotta, the only metal being gold in small quantity. The character of the work showed the existence of a culture belonging to the highest stage of polished stone. Many of the skulls were artificially deformed to a high degree, the frontal obliquity in some cases being double the normal. Add to this that there was present an almost unexampled prognathism, and we have crania quite without similars in other parts of the continent. When not deformed they were brachycephalic, and both series gave a respectable capacity, 1470 c. c. _2. The Chibchas._ Most of the writers on the Chibchas have spoken of them as a nation standing almost civilized in the midst of barbarous hordes, and without affinities to any other. Both of these statements are erroneous. The Chibchas proper, or Muyscas, are but one member of a numerous family of tribes which extended in both directions from the Isthmus of Panama, and thus had representatives in North as well as South America. The Chibcha language was much more widely disseminated throughout New Granada at the time of the discovery than later writers have appreciated. It was the general tongue of nearly all the provinces, and occupied the same position with reference to the other idioms that the Kechua did in Peru.[242] Indeed, most of the tribes in New Granada were recognized as members of this stock.[243] Nor were they so much above their neighbors in culture. Many of these also were tillers of the soil, weavers and spinners of cotton, diggers of gold in the quartz lodes, skilled in moulding and hammering it into artistic shapes, and known widely as energetic merchants. No doubt the Chibchas had carried this culture to the highest point of all the family. Their home was on the southern confines of the stock, in the valleys of Bogota and Tunja, where their land extended from the fourth to the sixth degree of north latitude, about the head-waters of the Sogamoso branch of the Magdalena. Near the mouth of this river on its eastern shore, rises the Sierra of Santa Marta, overlooking the open sea, and continuing to the neck of the peninsula of Goajira. These mountains were the home time out of mind of the Aroacos, a tribe in a condition of barbarism, but not distantly related in language to the Chibchas.