Diggers

Old history of the New World was coming to light. Each year that history looked more intricate, more ancient. It had not been an almost empty continent, with a few barbaric states, that the White Man's conquering guns and gods and diseases had invaded. The invaders had ended a succession of subtle, fantastic civilizations, and slain others just beginning to flower.

In romantic Chapultepec Castle, above the cypress-shaded park where Aztec Emperors once strolled, the Mexican Society of Anthropology met last week for its fourth annual "round table." The Mexicans and gringos who sat down together were, in an archeological sense, wealthy men. Around them extended a diggers' dream empire, hardly touched, which 100 expeditions with 100 fat budgets could not hope to explore completely in 100 years.

Man of Monte Alban. Hero of the occasion: Dr. Alphonso Caso, who was about to retire into politics, perhaps to be Mexico's Minister of Education. Dr. Caso, brother-in-law of mercurial Labor Leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, symbolized an era coming to a close. Under his direction, the ceremonial center of the Mixtecs and Zapotecs at Monte Alban, near Oaxaca, had been excavated. Digging carefully into the 60 square kilometers of overgrown mounds, Dr. Caso's men unearthed a dazzling complex of subtly designed stone tombs and religious buildings. In many they found golden masks and necklaces, carvings of stone and jade which had escaped the greedy Conquistadors.

Dr. Caso worked for 15 years, piecing together an elaborate culture which flourished until Spanish swords and crosses snuffed it out. A book about his painstaking work, to be published in a couple of years, will be a major contribution to New World archeology.

Just ending, too, was an eight-year dig by the Smithsonian Institution in Mexico's state of Veracruz. In hilly, jungle country, not far from the Gulf Coast, lived a people far older than the Zapotecs, probably older than the Mayas. Archeologists call their culture "Olmec"; but as people they have no name, no whispering mention in legend. The Smithsonian calls them the "La Venta people," after the place where their most impressive monuments were found.

Life at La Venta. According to Dr. Matthew Stirling, who headed the dig, the La Ventas were peaceful, since none of their carvings were warlike. They built no cities, but lived in simple thatched huts. They were certainly religious, for the priests who presided over their temples possessed almost all the wealth.

As the diggers probed the relics left by this simple people, they found unsimple things. The La Ventas were remarkable artists, who carved hardest jade into human figurines, ornamented ax heads, beads, earplugs, pendants. They were excellent potters, too. Example: a baked clay whistle in the form of a realistic bird, which gives the cry of the bird it represents.

Other clay figures showed animals mounted on wheels. This discovery thrilled archeologists. They had thought that the wheel, basic device of mechanical civilization, was unknown in the New World. But the La Ventas had wheels some 2,000 years ago, or had at least seen representations of them. How they learned about wheels, and why their knowledge died with them, remains a fascinating mystery.

Most spectacular finds at La Venta: stone jaguar-gods, carved altars, and enormous, realistic stone heads, two of them ten feet high, weighing 20 tons. They were hacked with jade tools out of basalt, whose nearest source is 75 miles away. One carved stone (see cut) bears a date corresponding to the White Man's 31 B.C., the earliest date yet found in the New World. The numerals, in the dot-and-bar system later adopted by the Mayas, prove that the La Venta people used the invaluable zero concept 600 years before Europeans did.

Unfinished Business. The diggers meeting at Chapultepec did not gloat over past achievements. They had too many adventures ahead. Next on their list: the Mexican states of Guerrero and Michoacan, littered with the mounds and ruins of vanished civilizations.

A tougher, even more interesting challenge: the extreme southern state of Chiapas. There, in densest jungle, dead stone cities stand, unexplored and almost unreachable.

How Far North? How much did the cultures of Mexico, rising and falling for more than 2,000 years, influence U.S. Indians? Last week Dr. Richard MacNeish of Chicago reported on an ancient trade route he had just discovered. The civilized Huasteca people, said Dr. MacNeish, left identifiable camp sites all the way up the Gulf Coast from their center near Veracruz to Texas. It is likely, he thinks, that Huasteca traders carried their goods and customs into the U.S. as much as 1,000 years ago. Perhaps few Mexicans went farther than Texas, but there is overwhelming evidence that their culture, passed from tribe to tribe, influenced much of North America.

At Spiro, Okla., are large low mounds, built by a long-forgotten people. In them have been found articles of stone, shell, clay and copper, many of which are so characteristically Mexican that their patterns could have come from nowhere else. Objects from a mound at Etowah in Georgia show similar influence. In faraway Wisconsin, a small dead Indian city looked so "Aztec," even to early natives, that a Judge N. F. Hyer named it Aztalan.

The Iroquois Pattern. In what is now the northeastern U.S., the light of Mexican civilization shone with distant dimness. There were no great mounds, no templed pyramids. But some archeologists believe that the superior economic and political system of the Iroquois was of ultimate Mexican origin, probably acquired via the southeast.

In New England, beyond the lands of the Iroquois, the last dim gleam of Mexican civilization died away. But even here, U.S. diggers find plenty of surprises in their own backyards. Last summer members of the Massachusetts Archeological Society spent weekends excavating the site of a longhouse at the Wampanoag village of Teathicut, 20 miles from Plymouth Rock. Longhouses were multiple dwellings rather like Quonset huts thatched with cattails, and housing several families. In a thick layer of charcoal and wood ashes, the diggers found about 1,000 implements, including European nails and gun flints, gifts perhaps of the Pilgrims, who knew Teathicut well. Below the ash layer came a five-foot silt deposit. Below this, on glacial sand, were cruder, more ancient stone implements, left by an earlier people.

Under downtown Boston lie the earliest New England remains: fish-weir stakes 30 feet below the street level, and dating, so diggers believe, from 2000 B.C. A subway excavation yielded 65,000 stakes in 1913. Last week, Frederick Johnson, curator of the Peabody Foundation at Andover, was watching another downtown excavation, in hope of learning more about those earliest Bostonians, who lived on codfish 4,000 years ago.

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