The Diggers

(In its last two issues, TIME reported leading archeological and paleontological events in the Western Hemisphere and in northern Africa in recent months. Herewith the European and Asian fields are covered, the African completed.)

At Giza, Egypt, Dr. George A. Reisner's Harvard-Boston expedition (TIME, March 23, 1925) effected entrance to a burial chamber near the Pyramid of Cheops; deduced from the disposition of furniture and the human remains that it was the reburial place of Cheops' father or mother. Out of a pious desire to have his parent near him in death, the son had moved them.

In Kaoko Veld, on the inaccessible, desert Southwest African coast, Anthropologists C. E. Cadle, Grant H. John and Paul L. Hoefler, financed by Denver business men, found survivors of the Keikum bushmen, "lowest living form of humanity," pigmy creatures, who can communicate among themselves only in tongue-clicks, who have no art left save dances imitating animals, no affairs but hunting food from day to day.

Greece, short of funds, worked out a plan of payments in land for the citizens of its pestilential slum quarter north of the Acropolis at Athens, whom it wished to evict that the greatest excavation in Europe since Pompeii might be made. Last fortnight, this digging finally began. Dr. Edward Capps of Princeton, onetime U. S. minister to Greece, turned the first spadeful of the thousands of tons of earth that will be removed from Athens' ancient Agora, or market place, the site of many temples which, though, looted by conquerors, should still contain many art treasures of the Golden Age. The digging is entirely under the American School of Classical Studies at Athens*; after 30 years or so of labor, the Agora will be given back to Greece, stripped of its 35 feet of debris, for a public park. Dr. Capps also formally opened the Gennadium, a new marble library built by the Carnegie Foundation to house historical documents given to the American School by H. E. Joannes Gennadius, wealthy Attic statesman.

Near Visby, "city of roses and ruins" on Sweden's island, Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, Professor Nils Lithberg came upon the ruins of a city at least 1,500 years old, which gave promise of yielding relics far older, relics of the Bronze and early Iron Ages. Excavations in Visby have turned up dwelling sites 4,000 years old.

In Denmark, diggers in a Slesvig bog, struck whale bones six feet down, unearthed the skeleton of a prehistoric species of leviathan which experts suggested might have been swept to his grave, 24 miles inland, by a tidal wave.

In London, burrowing 100 feet under Lombard Street ("Wall Street of England"), sandhogs rooted out hairpins, brooches, combs, sandals, cosmetic bottles, dainty spoons, ranged along a wall which could be identified, by a Claudian coin, as that of a Roman "beauty shoppe" of about 50 A. D.

On Selsey Beach, West Sussex, Kate Ray, governess, picked up a golden circlet of which she thought so little that she let her charges use it as a collar for their small canine. A Chichester silversmith saw it, notified the British Museum authorities, who pronounced it a priceless specimen of ancient British art, an armlet made for a royal child who doubtless lived about 300 B. C., when there was a big village where Bosham town now stands.** A jury of Selsey residents pronounced the find royal property, under the ancient law of treasure trove, entitling Miss Ray to 80% of the value fixed by the Museum.

From Moscow, archeologists reported having definitely located the historically uncertain site of Tschesilow, Moscow's 12th Century rival as chief Russian metropolis. Ruins were found on the banks of the Oka River, 70 miles south of Moscow. In neighboring caves and dugouts, glass ornaments, armlets, iron arrows, bone combs came to light, carrying the settlement's history back five centuries B. C.

At Ur of the Chaldees (Mesopotamia), diggers from the University of Pennsylvania and the British Museum continued laying bare buildings and opening mounds; found 4,000-year-old statues of Bau, goddess of the poultry yard, and Dungi, a builder monarch; also, "the most beautiful example of Sumerian sculpture yet found"--a head of the moon goddess Nin-Gal in white marble inlaid with lapis lazuli and shell. The expedition's object: to trace the ground-plans of Ur from 2,300 B. C. to 500 B. C./-

Near Kish (Mesopotamia), diggers from Oxford University and the Field Museum (Chicago) poked among mounds on the Biblical plain of Shinar for the ruins of three Sumerian cities older even than Ur--notably Opis. Pottery unearthed was highly colored, with geometrical designs. Clay tablets with linear inscriptions dated the cities back 5,000 years.

In the Desert of Sind (India,, Sir John Marshall, government archeologist, exhumed the remains of a finely built city of 5,000 years ago, with layers of older structures underneath. Close affinities were noted between this pre-Aryan culture on the banks of the Indus and the contemporary Sumerian culture far westward in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys.

In Mongolia, between Urga and Karakorum, a Russian expedition came upon remarkable rock sculptures and inscriptions: a giant tortoise, a sphinx, women, chieftains, tombs of ancient Mongolian khans.

In Korea, Japanese and Chinese archeologists, under Dr. Shukuto Harada of Tokyo Imperial University, have been investigating thousands of mounds containing relics of a high civilization, distinct from any known, that flourished 2,000 years ago.

At Cologne, excavations for an athletic park unearthed "by far the most important Roman settlement ever found in Germany." There were eight major buildings, evidently a manor house and adjacent cottages, arranged in a square 800 ft. on the sides, underlaid by an excellent sewer system. A kitchen contained complete cooking utensils and banquet hall plate. The date: First Century A. D.

*Founded in 1882 by Dr. Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard, and ever since then the training ground for most Greek scholars and many a leading architect of the U. S.

**Legend has it that King Canute stood on the shore at Bosham and commanded the waves to retreat, which they did not.

/-Abraham, ancestor of the Israelites, came from Ur.