Science: Diggers

The Past is a great broken tapestry whose threads are scattered through the earth. Year after year archeologists and paleontologists collect money, men and materials, journey forth to find the threads, weave them back into place. Recent doings of diggers:

Texas. One hundred million years old were the dinosaur eggs found in the Gobi Desert by Roy Chapman Andrews. They were the earliest eggs known to Science until the return of Harvard’s latest expedition from the Permian Red Beds of north central Texas. From that ancient ground Diggers Theodore White and Llewellyn Price plucked a rust-colored fossil egg, three inches long, which they estimated to be 225,000,000 years old. All evidence indicated that the egg was laid by Ophiacodon, a six-foot reptile with ponderous head and meagre limbs. Last week Harvard announced that the world’s senior egg is now on exhibition in its Museum of Comparative Zoology.

England. King Henry II of England (1133-89) was a coarse, bull-necked man of capricious temper, with a talent for statesmanship and a passion for territorial expansion. Deciding to correct abuses on the part of the ecclesiastical courts, he began well by declaring at Clarendon Palace his “Constitutions of Clarendon” which imposed reasonable restraints, but he fell out with Thomas a Becket, the up-&-coming young churchman whom he had promoted to be Archbishop of Canterbury. The resulting imbroglio with the Church was too hot for King Henry to handle; he ate crow and purchased absolution from the Pope.

Today the palace where the Constitutions were declared is a moldering, overgrown ruin on private land near Salisbury. Dr. Tancred Borenius of London’s University College, eminent Finnish-born scholar, diplomat and dendrologist, has been cutting away the ash trees, clearing out wagonloads of earth. Laid bare were parts of the great hall, two enormous kitchens, some state apartments, eating and drinking vessels from which irascible King Henry and his court feasted.

Greece. The city of Corinth, 1½ miles from the Gulf of Corinth, was a flourishing trade centre as early as the 6th Century B. C. It suffered spoliation at the hands of the Romans, recovered prosperity when Julius Caesar re-peopled it with Italian freedmen. Since 1896 the American School of Classical Studies has been digging on the site. Last season the School’s director, Richard Stillwell of Princeton, reported excavation of a building which was evidently the headquarters of a great banking & shipping union. Elaborate mosaic floors were found intact, one depicting a female figure astride a Triton, accompanied by cupids straddling bull-headed marine monsters. Evidently those ancient traders did not rely entirely on their own sagacity, because in the offices was a shrine where the concessionaires might worship.

Yugoslavia. “A second Pompeii!” was the exultant cry that went up in Belgrade from government archeologists who have been excavating the forgotten city of Stobi, founded by the Greeks 2,400 years ago, a beehive of art and learning under the Roman Empire. Already visible are gracious courtyards, marble fountains and swimming pools, a stone amphitheatre for gladiatorial contests seating 10,000, vivid blue, red, green and orange mosaics, the villa of a Roman governor. In the streets, laid bare by gangs of Yugoslav and Albanian peasants, are narrow ruts where, Dr. Vlada Petovich of the National Museumbelieves, the chariots of Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon passed. In the cellar of a synagogue is a curious cistern at the bottom of which the diggers found seven gold pieces—cast there, in Dr. Petovich’s opinion, by a scared Jew fleeing from the earthquake that destroyed the city.

Syria. Five miles from Antioch, a peasant scouring the countryside for building materials came upon the marble capitals of two Corinthian columns. Before Wellesley’s Professor William Alexander Campbell, backed by three museums and one university, reached the spot, the peasant had smashed up his find. But Digger Campbell went ahead to unearth greater treasures: a Greek theatre with an 80-ft. stage which inscriptions indicated was built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, a life-size alabaster statue, probably of Hadrian, and a villa with remarkable mosaic floors. One design, composed of glass cubes tinted in pastel shades, showed a male and a female figure, representing Autumn and Harvest, reclining on a couch where they were served by a personification of Wine. “Among the finest antique work ever discovered,” cried Professor Campbell.

First and most famed of the “Pillar Hermits” was St. Simeon Stylites (390-459 A. D.). According to Theodoret, a contemporary historian. Simeon was ejected from a monastery for practicing extreme austerities, took up his abode atop a 9-ft. pillar, made higher & higher pillars until he was finally ensconced on top of a 60-ft. column on which he lived for 36 years without once descending. The holy man hauled his food up with a rope, or it was carried up a ladder by his disciples, who founded monasteries nearby. Twentieth Century French diggers in Syria explored the great edifice of four basilicas built in St. Simeon’s honor, in the courtyard of which the base of his column still stands. Their last bulletin to the French Academy of Inscriptions was that a fragment of the pillar itself had been unearthed.

Egypt. Near the pyramid of Senusret at Lisht, 30 mi. south of Cairo, in clay undisturbed since the Twelfth Dynasty, an expedition of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art turned up four little ivory figures. The Egyptian Government insisted on keeping three of them; the museum put the fourth on exhibition. When Expedition Director Ambrose Lansing sat down to write his report, it occurred to him that the figures were once part of a mechanical toy. He built a model to show that if the three images kept in Cairo had been mounted on a flat piece of ivory by their original owner, a string looping their spool-like bases would have made them do an about-face or a full pirouette in unison. Carved with great delicacy, the four figures had an animation of posture and facial expression which moved Dr. Lansing to pronounce them unique in Egyptian art. Furthermore he thought they were probably the earliest known representations of Central African pygmies.

Alaska. The theory that North America’s first inhabitants came across a land-bridge from Asia to Alaska is practically synonymous with the name of Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, famed Bohemian-born anthropologist of the Smithsonian Institution. The bridge that once existed is now a chain of restless, smoking islands, striding westward across the Pacific from the Alaska Peninsula. To Kodiak Island, the largest, Dr. Hrdlicka has eagerly made six expeditions. With a group of students he went last summer, brought back 40 boxes of archeological finds, including some exquisitely wrought stone lamps and ivory portraits, some skulls crushed as if struck with heavy weapons. From the new evidence he pieced out a reconstructed story: First and longest parade of wanderers across the isthmus was of an unknown people of high culture who made the fine artifacts, lived in tents, were anthropologically not much like Eskimos. Each family seemed to choose a craft for specialization. Then came savages like the modern Aleuts who slaughtered the artists wholesale. Sometimes a few escaped, to return covertly and bury their battered dead in heaps, where Dr. Hrdlicka found them.