Diggers

All it took was a little imagination, and an amateur's interest in archeology. One day last fall Willy Stahl, Los Angeles musician and painter, went into the Mojave Desert 180 miles northeast of Los Angeles and tried to guess where he would have settled, had he been a Pinto Man living 10,000 years ago.

In those days, just after the last glacial period, he knew, the Mojave was well-watered, forested country. Amateur Archeologist Stahl tramped the desert, traced the course a river once ran, tumbling from the mountains down over a waterfall (now a dry lava cliff). Half a mile below the "falls," Stahl found a little rounded hill which must have been a pleasant spot in late Pleistocene times. "Here," he said, "is where I would camp if I were a Pinto Man." He dug holes in the bone-dry earth. Three feet below the surface he found stone artifacts characteristic of Pinto Man.

Ancient Camp. Last week a small expedition, led by white-haired Curator Mark R. Harrington of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, was pocking the hill with carefully dug excavations. Working with trowels and brushes in 100DEG heat, they turned up spear points, grinding stones and the charcoal of ancient fires. Their prize find: a piece of human thigh bone. Curator Harrington believes that the site was inhabited seasonally by 300 to 400 people about 10,000 years ago.

The camp ground is the best site found so far for the study of the early Californian, an unimaginative lowbrow if there ever was one. Pinto Man did his hunting with a "throwing stick" which projected stone-tipped spears. He made no pottery, knew no agriculture.

Until Harrington found the thigh bone, almost nothing personal was known about Pinto Man. But careful study of the bone showed that the ancient hunter was short (5 ft. 6 in.) and squat.

The desert camp site is only partly excavated, and still may be hiding a lot of answers archeologists would like to know. If Harrington finds bones of animals around the ancient hearths, he will be better able to fix the date of the "Pinto culture." Bones of American camels, or long-horned bison, for instance, would prove that the camp site was inhabited in the late glacial period. If he finds a fair set of human bones, he may establish Pinto Man's relation to other Early Americans, and to the latter-day low-cultured Indians who lived in Southern California before the white man arrived.

Pericles or Pinto. He might also find a good answer to an old, half-serious controversy: What will be the long-range effect of Southern California's bland climate upon humans who enjoy it?

Southern California has a "Mediterranean" climate (mild wet winters and hot dry summers) like ancient Greece. Therefore, enthusiasts claim, it will some time lead the world intellectually into a new Age of Pericles.

So far, anthropological precedents are all against them. The Southern California Indians, from Pinto's day to the white man's, enjoyed and benefited from the climate, but in cultural ways they were probably the lowest Indians in North America: simple "food gatherers" without agriculture, elaborate social organization or even effective weapons. Anthropological poser: When Eastern immigration ceases, will modern Californians, softened by the climate, sink gradually back to the food-gathering level?

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