Flying Archeologists

From interesting Santa Fe, N. Mex.,* scampered Charles Augustus Lindbergh last week,/- with a new nubble in the crown of his fame. Henceforth he must be considered the U. S.'s first flying archeologist, for the week before he initiated in the neighborhood of Santa Fe the first formal attempts of U. S. archeologists to locate digging sites by aerial photographs.

From an airplane or airship many a blurred earthly detail is clear. European archeologists have utilized this fact in England, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Africa. In England flyers have spotted old Roman camps because grain growing on their sites had a distinguishably different tint from grain growing on less disturbed soil. In Mesopotamia the soil of filled-in Babylonian irrigation ditches showed a texture different from that of the surrounding soil.

Dr. John Campbell Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, who directs excavations in Mexico and the Southwest, had asked Col. Lindbergh to make the pictures at Pecos near Santa Fe. The request followed the flyer's telling the doctor with awe of a Mayan temple city he had accidentally seen last February while flying over Quintana Roo, jungle- covered Mexican territory. Two green eyes had seemed staring up at him from among the trees. He flew lower. The eyes became pools before a pyramid temple. Tumbled around were the ruins of a city approximately eight miles in diameter. Flyer Lindbergh wanted to return there with aerial cameras. But Dr. Merriam advised him that there was more convenience and immediate utility in photographing the Santa Fe Indian sites. The success of the Santa Fe photography promises more similar U. S. exploring.

*Interesting for prehistoric Indian traces, present Indians, pueblos, Spanish conquest, somnolescence, artists, cemetery, old Governor's Palace (now a museum), scenery of Ben Hur (which the late Governor Lew Wallace wrote), turquoise and silver jewelry, September Indian fiesta, hospitality.

/- To act as a judge in Thomas Alva Edison's scholarship contest.-