Science: Diggers

Ancient Mexico is famous for its temples and pyramids; less known and harder to study are the lives of the ancient Mexicans. For nine years Archeologist Richard MacNeish of the Canadian National Museum has devoted himself to this job. Last week he was finishing the excavation of a cave in northeastern Mexico that contained a long cultural history of a Mexican people.

In the high Sierra Madre Mountains of the State of Tamaulipas lived the Huasteca Indians, who were tough and somewhat provincial. They never reached the top level of indigenous civilization, but from Dr. MacNeish’s point of view, they had an admirable habit: they lived or sheltered in dry mountain caves.

Since 1945 MacNeish has poked into more than 300 caves. In 1949 he found in one of them a primitive corncob which he sent to Botanist Paul C. Mangelsdorf of Harvard. Dated by radioactive carbon, it proved to be more than 4,000 years old and cleared up several mysteries about the origin of corn. Urged and partially financed by Harvard to find even older corn, MacNeish returned last year to Tamaulipas.

Dust Chronicle. Tipped off by Don Ignacio Guerra, a local rancher and amateur archeologist, he struggled up the remote Infernillo (Little Hell) Canyon and at last reached two caves in its vertical sides. The floor of the first was covered with four feet of dustlike material that he recognized at once as archeological pay dirt. It was chiefly the dried-up remains of millenniums of human occupancy.

There were 21 distinct layers, each older than the one above it. High points were the finding of five matting-wrapped mummies, bone-dry and well preserved. They had been buried in a doubled-up position, like babies in the womb. The ancient Huastecas believed in an afterlife, and they thought that this style of burial favored a prompt rebirth.

When the lowest layer of dirt was laid down considerably more than 4,000 years ago, the people who sheltered in the cave were simple hunters. They lived on wild plants and game, which they killed with crude spears. Fishing equipment (nets and wooden harpoons) suggests that the climate was wetter then, and that Little Hell Canyon may have contained a lake.

First sign of agriculture was squash seeds. Then came corn, the staff of Mexican life. The ears were only two or three inches long, and the kernels were covered with individual husks. Some cobs showed tooth marks; they had apparently been eaten as modern people eat sweet corn. MacNeish estimates that agriculture provided about 4% of the food at this period (4,000 years ago). The rest were wild plants and animals, which were hunted with the atlatl or spear-throwing stick.

Figurines & Child. Two thousand years later (about the time of Julius Caesar) a more sophisticated culture flourished in Little Hell Canyon. Corncobs were more numerous, and pods of beans, the second staple of Mexican diet, lay in the dust among them. Fragments of grinding stones suggest that the corn was ground into meal. The people had learned to make pottery, and their artistic or religious impulses led them to manufacture small clay figurines.

Nearer the surface and nearer in time lay the stone heads of arrows. The pottery was better, too. The corncobs were much bigger, and sugar cane and probably tobacco had joined the cultivated crops. In the topmost layers were corncobs almost as big as modern ones.

In the second cave Dr. MacNeish has already found the matting-wrapped mummy of a baby girl, folded up tenderly for a happier rebirth.

The modern descendants of the Huastecas, who still inhabit the Sierra Madre, have become devoted archeologists. Almost every day they tell him about some new cave to explore. They have even written songs about him. Sample: “Every moment came surprises/ Arrows of many sizes/ And wrapped in rare style/ Mummies thousands of years old . . .”