The Diggers

Little bands of men roaming over the earth, poking in caves, pits, mounds, quarries, buttes for vestiges of the creatures that 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 efforts and exhumations of the past few months in the Western Hemisphere:

In California, Ethnologist J. P. Harrington of the Smithsonian Institution sought to aid archeological Americana by questioning old, feeble Indians possessed of knowledge of their race's ancient settlements. One Francisco Laus rode with Mr. Harrington into Lost Valley and showed him, among other sites, a spot where Indians once caught eagles by lowering a brave down the face of a cliff in a rabbit-net made of red milkweed fibre. Down the Canada de las Uvas, (little canon of the grapes) one Angel Cuilpe, aged 104, showed him traces of wigwam towns; in Palm Canyon, one Juanito Razon, over 100, guided to ancient water holes, painted rocks, caves, sacred stones, magic springs.

In the Grand Canyon, R. Milton Fulle, tall blond Princeton senior, spent his Christmas vacation on a self-directed geology trip; discovered and photographed what his professors believe to be the four-inch footprints of an ancestor of modern frogs and salamanders, one of earth's first vertebrates.

At Linton, N. D., swellings and a bulge in the earth were identified by inhabitants as the first traces of Mound Builders to be discovered in their state. A tumulus seemed to be the temple mound, and two serpentine ridges-- 400 and 600 feet long, containing human bones--the burial mounds, of a settlement beside Beaver Creek that had crossed that stream for its rites of lustration before human sacrifices and burials. The effigies were much like the largest serpent mounds yet discovered (in Ohio).

At Fairfax, Mo., Frank Plumb, anthropologist, unearthed a skeleton measuring 7 feet 2 inches with a low, slanting skull that suggested the Mayan custom of flattening infants' heads; with a pear-shaped stone inside it such as the Mayans put in the mouths of their dead; with a bit of pottery nearby and a translucent stone carved with a Mayan figure.

Golconda, Ill., yielded a 17-foot mastodon spine from four yards of mud on the Ohio River bank.

At Phoenix, Ariz., excavations in La Ciudad, a pueblo ruin, continued under Archeologist Erick Schmidt of the American Museum of Natural History. Rewards: carved shells, pottery, arrowheads, grinding stones, two skeletons thought to be those of the race of Canal-Builders who first irrigated the Salt River valley.

In Nevada, an expedition from the Museum of the American Indian (Manhattan), called in by Governor James Graves Scrugham to examine the great cliff city (Pueblo Grande de Nevada) which he had discovered personally (TIME, March 23, 1925), threw up sand all winter over a stretch six miles long, baring abodes ranging from scooped-out hollows in the earth to extensive stone apartment-buildings that sheltered whole clans; bringing the number of skeletons found to 56, some wrapped in pink, purple and blue shrouds of soft texture, with turquoise, stone and shell ornaments littered near. In the Mountain of the Mother of Salt, a sand-strewn salt-hill several hundred feet high twelve miles from Pueblo Grande, a cave 140 feet deep and 50 wide sparkled brilliantly under the explorers' flashlights. They found stone hammers with the wooden handles preserved, bits of sandals, creosote-brush torches, even thousands of corncobs remaining from meals eaten by the prehistoric salt-miners, and hundreds of quids of a gummy plant chewed between meals. The explorers hoped to find mummies in this cave, the saline air of which might have preserved them better than all the oils and ointments of Egypt. The artifacts found seemed to date Pueblo Grande before the Aztec culture which Cortez and other Spaniards found flourishing in Mexico and the Southwest in the 16th Century.

At Princeton University, Geologist B. F. Howell announced that a tiny fossil fishplate (scale) which he had picked the previous summer out of Cambrian strata in Franklin County, Vt., had been identified as belonging to a primitive fish, the earliest known creature to possess a notochord (rudimentary spine), which swam in the days of trilobites and brachiopods as the then (over 50 million years ago) highest form of animal life. Fellow scientists named the scale in honor of its discoverer "Howell's dawn fish," marking the dawn of vertebrate life.

Tucson, Ariz., was thrilled when, in an old limekiln on Silver Bell Road, cast lead swords and crosses were unearthed, bearing inscriptions in Latin and Hebrew, whose face value indicated that Roman Jews had penetrated to Arizona in 760 A. D. and founded a kingdom lasting into the Tenth Century. Mormons rejoiced, saying that this chronology coincided with their sacred accounts of the Lamanites, a lost tribe of Israel, whose religion Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were divinely commanded to resurrect. Historians viewed askance the use of the initials "A.D." (Anno Domini) in the inscriptions. This calendar term was first suggested in 775 by the English scholiast, Bede; came into general use about 1000. In January, a retired cattleman of Tucson told of an educated young Mexican sculptor, Timotio Odohui, who had lived with his parents at the limekiln 40 years ago and molded articles in a soft metallic alloy much like lead. Odohui had had a library containing classic tomes and it was noted that the words used in the inscriptions were all discoverable in a glossary of foreign words and phrases.

In Peru, on the windswept Paracas peninsula, Dr. William M. McGovern, of London University, and Dr. Julio Tello, Harvard-educated Peruvian archeologist, gathered scattered bones, bits of pottery and building stone; dug six yards down and found the red porphyry walls and courtyards of a city of unknown extent dating to 1000 B. C. Burial caverns, scooped into solid rock like the interior of flat-bottomed water-bottles with yard wide necks, contained groups of mummies sitting in circles, the chiefs holding carved wooden staffs. Headbands and other trinkets of gold; primitive pottery and "magnificent" textile remains, approximated the lost Tiahuanaco culture of the Bolivian highlands. The Paracas city was named Cerro Colorado. Not many miles away is the ancient Cabeza Larga, a city preceding the Nascan culture, which preceded the establishment of the Inca empire (circa 1100 A.D.).

In Yucatan, where hot, silent bush spreads like a sea over leagues of country through which not even the Indians always know their way, two big parties searched out "lost" cities of the Mayan civilization to fill the, gap from 600 to 1000 A.D. in known Maya history. Dr. Thomas W. F. Gann, famed Mayan authority, led his aides along a giant, 50-mile stone causeway from Chichen-Itza to the lost, lagoon-locked city of Coba, a march often made ceremonially by the Cobans into Chichen-Itza and finally as a migration by the Chichen-Itzans into Coba, probably in the Sixth Century. Inscriptions appeared to bring Coba's history down to the 14th Century.

Dr. Herbert J. Spinden of the Peabody Museum (Boston) and Gregory Mason, formerly on the editorial staff of the Outlook, cruised the Yucatan coast, putting ashore five times in six days to visit Mayan cities unknown to modern history--Xkaret, Paalmul. Chakalal, Actuo, Acomal. Four or five miles apart, they were each discoverable by a small temple seen from the sea, and might be approached in a launch by a creek or canal leading to a lake, lagoon or bay. These cities were on the trade route between northern Yucatan and Mayan centres in lower Central America, particularly Guatemala. Like Dr. Gann, the Mason-Spinden expedition found some of the ancient shrines still in use by Indian hunters and chicle* workers, who mingle Catholic and Mayan rites in their worship. Next week TIME will catalog archeological findings in Europe, Asia, Africa.

*The basic substance of chewing gum, obtained from the bully tree and the sapodilla.