Science: The Diggers

Some of the major discoveries of diggers—archaeologists, paleontologists —recently made or described, include the following:

In Kentucky, diggers from the University of Kentucky unearthed 21 Indian skeletons, sitting up in their graves amid shell and bone implements and ornaments unlike any ever before found. The graves, discovered two feet deep in cultivated fields, were in an area of Mason County, near May’s Lick, where mastodon bones were once found.

In Manhattan, excavators for an apartment building turned up bones and “milk teeth” of a baby mastodon, the first of his race to be found on that island.

In Tunis, regiments of workmen obeyed, more and less satisfactorily, the behests of many and various heads of a large Franco-American mobilization whose collective effort is being expended to uncover Carthage—home of Dido, Hannibal, Hamilcar—and contemporary towns of the Punic civilization, buried Utica, submerged Jerba—the lotus-eaters’ island of the ancients.

A flood of reports has been issuing from this complex expedition, a main point being that the Tunisian Government, unlike the Egyptian, has received its guests well, cooperated with them in circumventing Carthaginian realtors whose plans for booming city lots in Carthage threatened to interfere with the scientists’ investigations. Finds included babies’ bottles, sunken gold, the dust of a dancing girl surrounded with funereal pomp, a hairpin and button factory, urns, tablets, a child’s savings bank, a broken flute, a bronze razor, rouge, baubles, etc, etc. The forum of Carthage, said to be the spot where Queen Dido founded the city, is a prime target of the shovelers.

In Babylonia, at Ur of the Chaldees, the joint British Museum-University of Pennsylvania expedition continued to exhume the architectural works of Nebuchadnezzar, his ancestors and his grandson. The major find was a limestone slab, 5 by 15 ft., decorated with a portrait and biographic scenes of King Ur-Engur, builder of the huge ziggurat of Ur or Moon God’s tower. The date of the slab was put at 2300 B. C., its historic importance being equaled only by its value as a specimen of Sumerian art.

From Mongolia, assistants of Colonel Kozloff, Russian explorer, telegraphed their chief that tumuli (mounds) he had been investigating in the birch and pine forests of the Kentei Mountains, near Urga, had yielded wooden engravings and water color pictures. Explorer Kozloff had already found there figured carpets, silken fabrics, 700 books written in seven languages including Hindu and Chinese, bloodstained women’s pigtails that suggested scalping. Earthenware established 200 B. C. as the probable date of the civilization to which tombs made of squared and planed logs, found at depths of 24 to 42 ft. underground, belonged.

From Russia, came reports: 1) Of an unknown seal of King Artaxerxes (I or III) of Persia, rummaged out of a museum storeroom, together with numerous coins of the Golden Horde (Tartars) who set up a dynasty in Russia in the 13th Century; 2) on the slopes of Mount Ararat (Erivan, Armenia, the head of a life-size statue of an early Armenian King, wearing what seemed to be Christian earrings; 3) of Neanderthal skeletons (fourth human era), dug also in Erivan.

In Hungary, archaeologists discovered peasants of the village O-szöny, near Budapest, feeding pigs in Roman sarcophagi troughs, hoarding gems and jewelry dug from their cottage foundations, which were placed on the original foundations of Brigetio, a Roman city of 40,000 inhabitants. Some children scrabbled up pre-Roman vessels of solid gold, dated 800 B. C. by the Hungarian National Museum.

In Italy, a perfect cavern-chapel to Mithras, Persian god of light, was found in Santa Maria di Capua. Some 100 other Mithraic shrines had been known in Italy, but none so complete as this. Frescos presented Mithras as a strong youth, in brilliant red tunic with green cuffs and gold fringe, sacrificing a white bull with red nostrils beneath a blue, star-studded sky.

In England, a saucer-shaped depression in chalk cliffs of the Medway Valley was found to contain relics, thought to date from mid-Pleistocene times (50,000 years ago). The relics: a “workshop,” with 4,000 tools in 17 heaps—hand axes of flint flakes, hammerstones of quartz, corepieces and nodules of flint.

From Africa, W. E. Cutler of the British Museum proclaimed the discovery of a dinosaur’s shoulder blade, 6 ft. 2 in. wide, in the beds near Lake Tanganyika. The dinosaur had kin in western North America.

In Arizona, an expedition sent by Edward L. Doheny, oil man, found pictures of dinosaurs, American elephants, prehistoric deer and men, scratched in the “desert varnish” (black iron scale) on a vertical, red sandstone canon wall.