Science: Diggers

An international fraternity of erudite men & women unite in the belief that a yellowed tooth, a scrap of papyrus or a piece of broken pottery may be a treasure beyond price. Doings of diggers lately:

Colorado, In 1926 a party of diggers from Denver went south to excavate for fossils near Folsom, N. Mex. Among the bones of extinct bison they turned up two curious flint implements which later attained fame as the first “Folsom points.” Obviously not arrowheads but possibly spearheads or darts, they were broad, flat blades with slightly rounded points, chiefly distinguished from other primitive weapons by deep troughs on each face. In subsequent years typical Folsom points were found all over the Midwest, as far east as Pennsylvania, as far north as New Hampshire, as far south as Georgia. The University of Denver records 295. Meanwhile “Folsom man” and “Folsom culture” remained elusive. Were the vanished hunters who used the points really as old (12,000 to 20,000 years) as the bison, mammoth, musk-ox and elephants whose bones were found with the points? Where were their own remains and their campsites?

Such was the Folsom situation when Major Roy Gregg Coffin of Colorado Agricultural College and his brother made a find in a dry arroyo that brought Dr. Frank Harold Hanna Roberts on the run from the Smithsonian Institution. Beneath 20 feet of ancient soil, Dr. Roberts laid bare what must have been a teeming Ice Age campsite and tool factory. Besides 30 Folsom points of jasper, chert and chalcedony, there was a scattered armamentarium of scrapers, knives, drills, engraving implements, hammers. Extending over a half-mile, the site was apparently once a lush pasture where Pleistocene animals, following the retreating ice rim, came to feed. That the hunters were contemporaries of the animals was perfectly plain because from most of the animal bones the toothsome marrow had been scraped.

But skeletons of the hunters did not come to light. First human remains found with Folsom points were reported from

Minnesota. William H. Jensen of Browns Valley was having his driveway repaired. In a load of gravel dumped out on his road he spied a hand-shaped stone implement and fragments of human bones. He notified Dr. Albert Ernest Jenks of the University of Minnesota who hustled to the scene with six students, probed the gravel pit. Seven weapons were found in all, some of them true Folsom points, mixed with 17 pieces of a badly mashed human skeleton. Dr. Jenks called its one-time owner “Browns Valley Man,” put his age at 12,000 years. He was 25 to 40 years old when he perished, had a short face and long skull like the Cro-Magnon man of Europe’s Stone Age, jutting brow ridges, a wide jaw and wide skull base.

Italy. When Perseus, son of Danae and great Zeus, was grown to manhood, the lustful king of Seriphus, who coveted his mother and would be rid of the son, sent him off to bring back the head of the Gorgon Medusa whose glance turned men to stone. With winged sandals given by the Nymphs, the helmet of Hades which made him invisible, and the sword of Hermes, Perseus watched Medusa’s reflection in Athena’s shield, cut off the head, returned to Seriphus to rescue his mother by exposing the petrifying head to the eyes of the king and all his court.

So runs the Greek legend. Lately Italian archeologists, probing the sand dunes near the ancient port of Ostia at the mouth of the yellow Tiber, turned up a marble statue of Perseus, a curly-haired youth clutching his dreadful trophy. The statue bore some resemblance to the Hermes of Praxiteles, was apparently carved in the Graeco-Roman period (100 B. C.-200 A. D.).

Greece, Scene of the famed Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece lies 14 miles northwest of Athens. The site was despoiled by Alaric the Visigoth in 396 A. D., and its ruin was probably completed in the following century by order of the emperors of Constantinople. It remained buried until 1882 when the Greek Government began excavations. For the last five years Professor George E. Mylonas of Washington University (St. Louis), backed by Rockefeller funds, has been working on the site with three Greek savants. The great hall of mysteries with its gateways and fortifications was uncovered before he appeared. It was believed that a sanctuary built in the 7th Century B. C. was the earliest theatre of the rites, that they were introduced to Greece shortly before that, some scholars thought from Egypt.

Details of the Eleusinian ceremonies remain wreathed in shadow. From inscriptions, works of art, and allusions of old chroniclers and dramatists it appears that the mystae or votaries made annual pilgrimages from Athens, watched some sort of passion play, witnessed a parade of holy objects, heard a discourse by a hierophant. The cult was centred around a legend of the Goddess Demeter, who sorrowed for her abducted daughter, searched for her, sat by a sacred well.

Exploring the sanctuary, Dr. Mylonas and his colleagues discovered that three earlier sanctuaries lay beneath it. Last season they ascertained that in the oldest the Eleusinian rites were held as far back as the 14th Century B.C.—which makes Eleusis by far the oldest Greek city exhumed and, according to Dr. Mylonas, disposes of the theory that the rites were imported from Egypt. Also cleared last season was the 14th Century Palace of the Rulers, where the Goddess was supposed to have taken refuge. An object of search and speculation for 25 years, the palace revealed one room closely resembling the throne room of the Palace at Knossos. Broken pottery and crude clay figurines were found. Final task was clearing the well beside which the goddess rested. The diggers were hopeful that it contained a wealth of objects of art, found it had long ago been rifled, was empty.