Diggers

Last week TIME reported significant efforts and exhumations by archaeologists, ethnologists, anthro pologists, geologists, paleontologists, etc., in the Americas during the past few months. Folloiving are significant efforts and exhumations in Europe.

In England, a plot of ground was discovered in London near Fleet Street, that had never been built on. Diggers unearthed "15 feet of solid history," relics dating from the Paleolithic period (with a gap from Saxon times to the 13th Century) to the present. P:Workmen digging for foundations for the new Bank of England building turned up the leather soles of Roman women's shoes. Newspaper stories were written to the effect that styles have changed little.

P:An ingenious deduction emanated from Oxford to explain the frequency of discoveries of old Roman coins. The explanation: In Roman garments there were no pockets, only loose folds. Coins, brooches, studs, gems, girdles dropped out easily.

Archaeologist J. Reid Moir published further results of his per sistent excavations in limestone quarries near Ipswich, East Anglia. Flint tools found in a pre-Pliocene layer indicated that the history of man stretches much further back than is supposed. The site was northwards of the site where the Piltdown Man was discovered, on the shore of a warm North Sea which then had no outlet channel between France and England.

Near Wroxeter, a shattered Roman tablet related, when pieced together, that the Roman ruin from which it was retrieved was a forum --the largest yet found in England --built by Emperor Hadrian in A. D. 130. Wroxeter's name in Hadrian's day was Uriconium. Uriconian relics: a steel-sheathed cockspur, coins, a surgical lancet, sandal imprints on cement. P:Sir Humphrey Rolleston consoled his fellow countrymen by telling the British Medical Association that mummies almost 5,000 years old examined by him bore traces of gout, tuberculosis, pyorrhea; that a bust of Alexander the Great gave hints of cerebro-spinal meningitis.

In France, near Treves, a shrine built by Gauls to Mithras, god of light, was found. Mithras was a Persian deity, a strong rival of Christianity during the first three centuries A. D.

Near Deauville, modern playground, eleven 11th Century sarcophagi were found containing small women, giant men.

In Sweden, Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf formally opened as an elec trically lighted museum a 1,200-year-old Viking burial mound at Lugnaro (west coast).

In Italy, digging went forward as never before. Rome needs a subway. The tracks will run about on the level of the city of the Caesars. Archaeologists will watch over the shoulders of blasters, pickers and sandhogs to recover relics, having authority to order deviation from the engineers' surveys to preserve buried buildings, whose locations are first carefully mapped.

At Naples, Fascist engineers commenced the task of extricating Herculaneum, sister city of Pompeii, supposed to have been founded by Hercules upon a trip west to the Hesperides. To signalize the project, King Vittorio Emanuele presided over a sea festival at which a barge-load of night fireworks was touched off in the Bay of Naples. The same evening, Mount Vesuvius cleared its volcanic throat noisily, emitting an extra quantity of pink steam and rumbles as though commenting upon the projected removal from Herculaneum of its deep crust of Vesuvian lava.

At Bacoli on the Tyrrhenian coast, a tomb was found which the discoverers told themselves was that of Pliny the Elder. He died at Bacoli in 79 A. D.--scholar, wit, historian.

At Cumae, a huge shell was found in the Sibyl's grotto, which the discoverers told themselves was the amplifier through which the Sibyl had broadcast her prophecies.

In Greece, excavation of the agora (market place) of old Athens was formally but not extensively begun last year, by the American School of Classical Studies. The agora extends under a large but deteriorated section of the present city. The Greek Government is to furnish the sites, the school the digging funds. Last week the Greek Cabinet ratified the final arrangements for this digging to continue five years. All finds will stay in Greece. Trustee Edward Capps of the School, professor of Greek at Princeton and one time (1918-19) U. S. Red Cross Commissioner to Greece, prepared to return to the U. S. to fetch the digging funds, of which $500,000 is already available, with $500,000 more to come in two years.

At Nemea, financed by citizens of Cincinnati, Ohio, Acting Director Carl W. Blegen of the American School of Classical Studies set 90 men to work clearing the remnants and adjuncts of the Temple of Zeus, discovered last year. A crypt, sacrificial altar and stadium site came to light. The crypt of adytum, used by priests for unknown rituals, was about 12 by 13 feet, roughly built, its floor stuccoed. Perforated columns like huge hitching-posts, deepened the mystery of the crypt's use.

In Minorca (Balearic Islands), Archaeologist Frederick Chamberlin of England examined the local "talayots" (pyramidal stone mounds) more closely than anyone before him. He found them different from the "nuraghes" of Sardinia and "cairns" of Britain, which they had been supposed to parallel in human history. The talayots, when pulled apart, were found to be solid, with no interior chambers. Digging beneath the talayots might reveal a race quite distinct from the prehistoric morticians who made hollow cairns and nuraghes.