Science: Diggers

The Shrine of Lady Luck. Praeneste, often mentioned by the classical writers, was an ancient religious center 23 miles east of Rome in the Sabine hills. Sacred to the goddess Fortuna, it was the Roman world’s bulkiest, solidest shrine. It throve for a thousand years, reaching its peak about the time of Christ, and was the last pagan center to be suppressed by Christianity. When Lady Luck was still lucky, her intricate complex of sacred buildings covered an area a dozen times bigger than St. Peter’s.

During the Dark Ages, Fortuna’s temples were looted down to their bones. Even their marble facings were carted away for building material. Gradually the town of Palestrina and the feudal stronghold of the Colonna family spread over the massive remains, effectively hiding them from archeologists. In 1944, Allied bombings peeled away the medieval buildings. When the war ended, Palestrina was a wreck, but the lower parts of Fortuna’s temple lay almost undamaged under heaps of rubble.

Last week, after eight years of work. Italian archeologists had cleared away the rubble, and visitors could see what the massive old shrine was like. Said Professor Pietro Romanelli, chief supervisor of ancient ruins in central Italy: “We have unearthed enough to show the broad outlines of the temple at a glance, and to give us so much precise knowledge of its layout that except for a few details we could rebuild it today as it was in its prime.”

Visitors can walk through stately halls and a network of chapels and oracle rooms, still paved with mosaics, where worshipers asked the advice of the goddess. The temple must have been, also, rather like a pagan Lourdes, where pilgrims prayed for relief from bodily ailments. The many shops that cluster thickly around the shrines supplied votive offerings of clay, marble, silver or gold shaped realistically to represent afflicted parts of the human body. Some of these grisly, pathetic objects still remain after 14 centuries.

Confession Stones. Since before World War II, Dr. Karl Lehmann of New York University has been digging away at an even older center of religion: the temple of “the Great Gods,” who were old when Greece was young. Their headquarters was on the Aegean island of Samothrace, and their “mystery” (basically a worship of fertility) began before Homeric times and lasted into the Christian period.

On his latest tour of digging, Dr. Lehmann unearthed some of the holiest objects in the Great Gods’ system. Near one of the temples, he dug up a stone base with a hole to support a large torch. On either side of it are two stone blocks. He believes that on these blocks, often described in ancient literature, stood the candidates who were about to be admitted to higher ranks of the religion. The exact rites of initiation were kept secret, but they are known to have included a confession of sins.

Jawbone’s Burins. In a less pleasant place than the isles of Greece, traces of a cruder culture came to light. Anthropologist J. Louis Giddings Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania reported last week on a visit to northern Canada, where he went to study changes in the climate. While at the little port of Churchill on Hudson Bay, he met a Mrs. Irwin H. Smith, an amateur botanist who had bought some odd flint objects from an Indian named Thomas Jawbone. Dr. Giddings took a good look and then hurried off to find Mr. Jawbone. Some of the objects were a kind of “burin” (a stone-engraving tool) that is seldom found in the New World.

Jawbone took him on a rugged three-day canoe trip up the Knife River and showed him the bleak stretch of windblown sand where he had found the flints. There were plenty more of them lying on the surface. Dr. Giddings picked up 80 artifacts: scrapers, blades, needle-like flakes and more of the rare burins. These prove, he believes, that in the remote past, perhaps as long ago as 10,000 years, people of the same culture lived all around the Arctic regions of the world. The same peculiar burins have been found in Alaska, East Greenland and Siberia. Almost nothing more is known about these circumpolar people. In the New World, they were probably replaced comparatively recently by invading Eskimos.