Science: Diggers

Little bands of men roaming over the earth, poking in pits, caves, quarries, mounds, buttes, for vestiges of the creatures that roamed the earth before them. Bigger bands of men examining maps, bringing steam shovels, excavating whole dead civilizations. Millions of dollars spent in digging every year. . . . Following are significant efforts and exhumations of the past two months.

North America. The most fruitful and fascinating digging on this continent has been conducted by five distinct expeditions, amid ruins of the antique (600 B. C.—1500 A. D.) Mayan civilization.

In Yucatan, Dr. Herbert J. Spinden of the Peabody Museum (Boston) and Gregory Mason reached the definite conclusion that the Mayas originated in the Mexican highlands and in Guatemala, not being immigrants from Africa or Polynesia as has sometimes been suggested.

Edward Herbert (“Don Eduardo”) Thompson, excavator of the sacred well of Yum Chac, the Rain God, and many another spot in Chichen Itza, the Mayan Capital (TIME, May 17, BOOKS), has pushed his investigations inland to Coba, an older, provincial Mayan city [visited last winter by Dr. Gann (TIME, April 26)]. The expedition found unknown ruins called by local bush-dwellers “Macanxoc” meaning “you can’t read it,” ruins of what was doubtless Coba’s religious centre.

In Spanish Honduras. Dr. Thomas W. F. Gann of the British Museum investigated engraved Mayan monoliths that furnished an accurate check on the calendar archaeologists have worked out for Mayan history. In Guatemala, Dr. Manuel Gamio of Mexico dug into highland strata, discovered archaic pottery and sculptures clearly pre-Mayan to support the theory that the Mayas’ ancestors lived in the hills, whence earthquakes drove them to lower levels and firmer architecture.

In Mexico proper, a mixed band of diggers financed by J. L. Phillips of Georgia penetrated the wild interior of the State of Chiapas to Palenque, another extinct Mayan capital.

An expedition backed by the Mexican government and headed by Professors Enrique Palacios and Miguel Mendesabal of the National Museum reported finding also in wild Chiapas a Mayan city older even than Palenque, a city dating to 1000 B. C. Guards were posted to prevent avaricious Indians from plundering the ruins, as they invariably try to do in search of Montezuma’s* treasure.

Still deeper in wild Chiapas, the Mexican savants found a still older city, Junchavin, near the Guatemalan border. Signs indicated that the prehistoric inhabitants had covered their spacious settlement with a blanket of masonry before evacuating. The inscriptions on monoliths and on a “million-year-old” stone were reported of unknown designs, surely pre-Mayan.

In Louisiana, Smithsonian Institution men reported traces of Mayan influence in pottery and ornaments taken from “kitchen middens” or mounds of clam shells, upon which doubtless lived prehistoric ancestors of the Chitimachan mound-dwellers observed there in the 17th century by Frenchmen.

In Florida, a 35-ft. idol with Mongolian features, carved from “wood eternal” (sea mangrove), was found near a burial mound whose occupants lived, guessed scientists, 2,000 years ago.

In Arizona, Professor Byron Cummings of the state university refused to comment on the efficacy of a divining rod (a wishbone-shaped stick with a wooden thimbleful of “certain chemicals” at the fork) by which one of his geologists, one Charles Udall, located a mammoth’s shoulder blade near Arivaca. Diviner Udall’s thimble contained something sensitive to lime deposits. The stick dipped to outline a mammoth’s tusk, a whole mammoth’s skeleton, a buried dinosaur. Dr. Cummings, instead of theorizing about the instrument, proceeded to investigate further whether an important new fossil bed had been discovered.

In the Grand Canyon, along the Hermit Trail, U. S. National Museum men busied themselves making photographs of what some took to be tracks of a prehistoric 8-legged 16-toed animal in shale and sandstone strata, 400 ft. lower than any foot printed strata known thereabouts.

Near Flagstaff, Dr. J. Walter Fewkes, chief Smithsonian ethnologist, has taken up summer quarters to study the Hopi ruin of Wupatki, which he first described 25 years ago and last year succeeded in having preserved as a national monument.

From Kansas, to Washington, D. C., to Philadelphia, for exhibition by the Smithsonian Institution at the Sesquicentennial, went two fish skeletons, one of twelve feet, the other of six. Six-foot was inside twelve-foot, evidently having served as a fatal meal one day seven or eight million years ago.

In Washington, Professor Olaf Opsjon of Spokane probed and puzzled over ideographs found hidden beneath moss and lichen on a lava boulder near a burial mound. Other archaeologists awaited Professor Opsjon’s reasons for believing that the runes were the work of a band of Norsemen in 1010 A. D., including 24 men, 7 women and a baby, who recorded their defeat by Indians during a Norse exploration hitherto unsuspected by latterday historians.

Europe. Little news came from the greatest digging project in history: the exhumation of the Athenian agora by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, which began in May (TIME, May 10). At Gibraltar, a Miss Garrod of Oxford University unearthed the frontal bone and other fragments of an immature human skull estimated 25,000 years old (Stone Age). At Corinth, Professor T. Leslie Shear of Princeton University conducted excavations on the great theatre site, disclosing several superimposed theatresof various eras, sculptures of Greeks and Amazons embattled, the labors of Hercules, giants’ heads.

At Rome, excavations begun several years ago by the Rev. Canon E. S. Hughes, vicar of St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, were said to have removed all doubt that both Saints, Peter and Paul, died in Rome and were buried near the Basilica of San Sebastiano, sometimes called “Basilica Apostolorum”, on the Appian Way. The diggers also claimed to have established that the term “catacomb”—ad or in catacumbas is the form generally used—loosely applied to all underground cemeteries in Rome, really belongs to the swale they were investigating, a likely derivation of the word being the Greek for “down in the hollow.”

Also near Rome, from the deep, deep bottom of Lake Nemi, dredgers brought up bits of timber long known to be parts of an old Roman pleasure barge, which U. S. agriculture experts declared to have been built of sprucewood. Forthwith, Premier Mussolini declared his engineers would raise the craft and probably treasures, too, a feat that baffled ingenious Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century.

Near Moscow, a Dr. Grigorovich unearthed what he believed was a fossilized human brain, lying in soft white clay hard by a mammoth’s tooth.

Asia. Digging in Asia has been handicapped by civil ructions. The chief expedition, under Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History, waits at Peking to re-enter the Gobi Desert and investigate further the fossil beds that Andrews believes prove Asia to have been the dispersion centre of all mammalia. While waiting, however, Andrews’ paleontologist, Walter Granger, investigated a trade in “dragon bones” that has flourished along the Yangtze River for many centuries. He was led to a fossil bed in the province of Szechwan, containing remains of some two score Pleistocene animals including a stegodon (form of mammoth), giant tapir, rhinoceros and guar (bison).

Africa. Few African finds were reported, either from Egypt or the extensive workings at Carthage. The most notable despatch came from Germany, where Professor L. Borchardt advanced a new theory on the “lost continent,” Atlantis.

Professor Borchardt had fitted references in Plato, Diodorus, Pliny, Ptolemy and other ancient historians together with names he found still extant in Tunis and among the Libyan tribes of the Sahara, arriving at the conclusion that “Atlantis” was an island in the “Sea of Atlantis,” which the earthquake of 1250 B. C. changed to the wide salt marshes known now as Shott el-Jerid, inland from the Gulf of Gabes. The “Pillars of Hercules” were not, according to Professor Borchardt, what we now call Gibraltar, but were in the Sahara south of the “Sea of Atlantis.”

*As everyone knows, Montezuma was an Aztec, reigning in Mexico in the 16th Century. But so shrewd was Montezuma that he may well have used Mayanruins as his safety deposit vaults.