The Diggers

Little bands of men roaming over the earth, poking in caves, pits, mounds, buttes for vestiges of the creatures who roamed the earth before them. Bigger bands of men examining maps, bringing steam shovels, excavating whole dead civilizations. Millions of dollars spent in digging every year. Following are significant exhumations of the past few months;

At Bainbridge, Ohio, state archeologists opened the great Seip Mound and discovered four evidently royal cadavers of the pre-Indian Mound Builders, lying among quarts and quarts of fresh-water pearls and many polished and carved stone pipes (TIME, Sept. 21). Absence of weapons reaffirmed the belief that the Mound Builders cultivated chiefly the arts of peace. A copper nose on one corpse, patterned cloths under the bones, demonstrated two of these arts.

At Walkerton, Ind., a farmer opened a mound, disclosed eight skeletons, one of them clad in copper armor, lying feet together like spokes in a wheel. A giant for stature had a flint arrow head embedded in his skull. The bones appeared to be of Mound Builders.

Near Scenic, S. D., a Harvard field party uncovered fossil crocodiles of the Oligocene period (two million years ago, when crocodiles were among the highest forms of animal life). Of much the same structure as crocodiles today, these measured 6 ft. by 16 in.

In Nevada, Governor James Graves Scrugham reported having enlisted capital for continued excavations in "Pueblo Grande de Nevada," the pueblo cliff city eight miles long which he discovered personally last year and intends making into a state park. Some 50 of the 10,000 or more graves have been opened, containing corn, weapons, decorations and dice, dating (by estimate) to 5,000 B. C. Hard by the city is a turquoise mine. Some of the skeletons are gigantic.

In New Mexico and Arizona, tremendous prehistoric stone "apartment houses" were found, three-to five-story communal dwellings, some housing 600 to 1,200 Indians, whose hieroglyphics are not unlike those of the Chinese. The age of these cities was put between 2,000 and 5,000 years. In Roosevelt Lake (Arizona), a city emerged from the water during a drought. Like the Nevada aborigines, these Arizona men were big. Their culture was much higher, from Mexico probably, even, considering their great numbers, the possible original of Mexican culture.

Farther north in this state, an expedition financed by .Edward L. (oil) Doheny, found dinosaur tracks and animal pictures in the Grand Canyon.

Near Bend, Ore., a University of Oregon geologist found fossils of huge camels in Pleistocene strata.

Monroe, N. Y., contributed to the nation's store of mastodon bones, skulls, teeth.

In Mexico, miners prospecting the Chihuahua Mountains found, intact in a hidden cave, a group of skeletons in sitting postures, arms crossed over knees. Measured from crown to heel they sat five to six feet high; erect they would have stood ten to twelve feet. Anthropologists set off to examine these giants, hoping to clear the doubtful origin of the Chihuahua Indians, a rangy race.

In Yucatan, Edward H. Thompson of the Peabody Museum (Boston), to whom is credited introduction* of the Mayan civilization to modern archeology, rounded out 20 years of work with an extraordinary feat and returned home. He knew that the Mayans practiced a sacrificial ceremony at their sacred wells, in their holy city, decking virgins with jade and gold and hurling them, amid clouds of incense, into great limestone sinkholes, one of which measured 168 feet across and contained 80 feet of water and mud. After digging around for years, with indifferent luck, Professor Thompson went back to Boston and acquired a diver's technique by engaging to scrape barnacles off the hulls of ships. Returning to Yucatan, he gauged the point on the sacred well's brink whence the victims were probably thrown. He hurled in logs of human weight to approximate the drowning spot. He brought in a dredge, and after removing tons of mud put on his rubber armor and steel helmet, dropped down and recovered 90 skeletons and a priceless collection of jade and golden images, now on view at the Peabody museum. The Carnegie Foundation will carry on his work.

From Bolivia and Argentina, after 28 months' work, Professor Elmer S. Riggs of the Field Museum (Chicago), returned, bringing 800 fossils of 100 species of animals aged 8 to 15 million years. Most were taken from beds on the sea floor at the foot of towering cliffs, on the Santa Cruz coast. There the average tide-rise is 56 feet, and the work had to be done in dashes at the ebb. There was no evidence that the creatures found had had any communication by a land bridge with North America or any other continent. They formed a unique group of pre-Pleistocene fauna--giant ground sloths, shell-backed glyptodons, macrauchenia (camels, snouted like tapirs), toxodons (tusked hippos) and a bird-like flesh-eater called phororhacos.

Mariana Islands. Scientists of the Bishop Museum of Honolulu reported the discovery on the Mariana Islands, between Hawaii and the Philippines, of ancient ruins antedating the present Chomarro race, which has resided there for upwards of 1,000 years.

There are hundreds of tall, gracefully shaped stone columns bearing carved caps, each weighing nearly a ton, and arranged in long colonnades and circles. The purpose of the great edifices of which these were a part is so far unknown, nor has it been possible as yet to determine the date of their construction or the race of their builders.

Athens is the scene of an archeological project that will rival the late Lord Carnarvon's work in Egypt and that of the Count de Prorak at Carthage. The Greek Government (doubtless beholding the influx of tourist money to Egypt) offered to buy and raze some 20 blocks in the business section of Athens and give the right of excavation to the American School of Classical Studies* (backed by 40 U. S. institutions). Twenty to 30 feet beneath the tract lies the Athenian market-place as it was known by Themistocles, Plato, Demosthenes, et al., in whose day it was as the Forum in the grand days of Rome. Temples and statues famed throughout antiquity will come to light "of far greater importance than Pompeii."

At Corinth. The J. P. Morgan-financed diggers at Corinth, having removed 5,000 tons of earth, beheld the first example known of large-scale Greek painting--a decoration upon the guard walls of an arena, showing gladiatorial combats lifesize, in color. A Targe Roman villa of the First Century A. D. yielded floor mosaics that are "without doubt the finest thing of the sort yet found in Greece," according to Dr. T. Leslie Shear of the American School of Classical Studies.

In Czecho-Slovakia, workmen quarrying glacial silt for a brick company uncovered the family tomb of Aurignacian mammoth-hunters of 800 generations (20,000 years) ago. There were 12 adult skeletons and eight of children, reposing under a layer of stones (protection from beasts) within a mortuary chamber formed by walls of mammoths' bones. Mammoth lower jaws constituted one wall, shoulder blades a palisade opposite. It was the largest single collection of prehistoric human remains ever discovered, and admirably preserved.

Asia. Speak of digging in Asia and you think of Roy Chapman Andrews. After another year on the uncivilized side of the Gobi Desert, he is on his way back to the American Museum of Natural History with plunder from Mongolian beds where "the fossils were so thick they almost interlaced." Paleontologist Andrews shares the view of many a scientist that Mid-Asia was the birthplace and distribution centre of mammalia. His chief finds: many more fossil dinosaur eggs (two years ago he fetched several dozen); several baluchitherium (early rhinoceros) skulls; an unknown two-horned fossil, seemingly a primitive giraffe; some marsupial (pouched) types; and traces of a human civilization that went from Europe into Asia.

From India through Java, Australia and Africa, Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, curator of the U. S. National Museum, scouted out new fields for scientific research. Returning last month to Washington, he reported several new species of fossil big apes in Siwalik Hills (Burma); a new place to dig in the Solo Valley, stamping ground of Pithecanthropus erectus, the Java apeman; two new cave men's skeletons from the Broken Hill country in Rhodesia, South Africa, source of the famed Taungs skull.

In Palestine, Professor James H. Breasted of the University of Chicago laid the plans for exploring Armageddon, battlefield of humanity described in the Apocalypse. The site is a mounded plain on a mountain shelf overlooking the Plain of Esdraelon, near Mount Carmel. Funds were furnished by John D. Rockefeller Jr.

In Tokyo, a professor of the Imperial University explained 16 skeletons beneath the foundation of an old castle tower as probable relics of a "human pillar," such as the ancient Japanese would bury at bridgeheads or embankments to propitiate the super-god of rivers during construction projects.

In Babylon, excavations have proceeded as never before. British and University of Pennsylvania diggers continued turning up the wonders of Ur of the Chaldees. Their finding of the great ziggurat or tower, the temple of the moon god and the temple of Nin-Gal, wife of the moon god, was reported in TIME, March 23.

In Palestine, the ancient Third Wall of Jerusalem was further excavated.

At Beisan (ancient Bethshan), University of Pennsylvania diggers believed they had found the Temple of Ashtaroth (Philistine goddess) where Saul's armor was hung after his defeat in the battle of Gilboa (Samuel I, 31:10). In Tunis, the forces marshaled under Count Byron de Prorak of France ended a season's digging in the ruins of Carthage and set about examining their finds. Sacrificial urns full of charred babies' bones, taken from the temple of the goddess Tanit, were the chief exhibit.

Off the Carthaginian coast, at the Island of Djerba, the expedition's divers groped for a submerged city whose walls had been reported seen by a sponger. They found pottery, a sunken treasure-galley and deep submarine pits, which support the theory that the city was engulfed by a terrestrial convulsion.

In Algeria. Reconnoitering inland by motor, the de Prorak experts visited El Djem, Timgad and other ancient cities whose bones lie bleaching under the African sun. On the banks of the dried river Loug (Algeria), 70 Neolithic flints and a stone hatchet aged 150,000 years (Paleolithic) were found on a hearth site 300 by 150 yards in area. A blanket of black ashes and charred bones lay beneath the desert sand.

In the Sahara, a cliff overlooking the dried bed of the Aolgui River was christened "The Mountain of Love" by the expedition under de Prorak, who discovered carved thereon love messages of youths and maidens belonging to the ancient (white) Lybian race of North Africa. Examples: "I, Beltain, proclaim love for Lili." "I surely have said all I can to you." Professor Reygasse of the expedition advanced the theory that carved pairs of footprints, one a man's, one a woman's with names scratched between, which were discovered on the cliff, had served as marriage records.

In Egypt, Howard Carter and the Egypt Exploration Society carried on Lord Carnarvon's work in the Valley of Kings. The palace of King Tut-Ankh-Amen was found several hundred miles from Luxor, his last resting place.

Near Cairo, a funerary chamber found was called "oldest stone building in the world" (over 5,000 years). Near Thebes, a cemetery yielded examples of burying from a prehistoric coffinless method to early mummification. In the Fayurn district, University of Michigan men found a pagan chapel, with images of Demeter, Hecate, the Sacred Bull, Apis, Harpocrates and Cerberus. At Ghizeh, Dr. George A. Reisner of Harvard put his 26th year on Egyptology and hinted that he had a solution to the construction secrets of the great Pyramids.

Of all nationals digging in Egypt, the U. S. groups were "the only ones with money." Professor James H. Breasted of the Oriental Institute (University of Chicago) supervised the completion of a station equipped to record inscriptions, etc., in the field.

*Undoubtedly Mexico's Spanish conquerors in the 16th Century knew of the Mayan peoples. Charnay, a Frenchman, investigated superficially in the '80's of the last century.

*Germany had the honor of excavating Olympira; France, the oracle of Delphi; England, Sparta, the U. S., Corinth. None of these nations had any real archeology until schooled to it in Greece.