Diggers

Recent discoveries in archeology and paleontology:

Irak. Fifteen miles northwest of Mosul, whence oil was first piped to the Mediterranean two months ago (TIME, Jan. 28), lies Tepe Gawra ("Great Mound"), its depths chewed by the shovels of industrious diggers. University of Pennsylvania scientists sank a trial trench in 1927, were convinced that the remains of 20 cities or settlements lay buried in layers, the most recent dating from 1500 B. C., the oldest lost in antiquity, older by far than Ur of the Chaldees (4000 B. C.). One city after another came to light. Last month diggers under Charles Bache of Philadelphia's University Museum laid bare the Eleventh Level which they assigned to 3750 B. C. Before them was evidence of a civilization as high as that at the Eighth Level (3500 B. C.).

Mr. Bache found crumbled temple and dwelling walls, spindles, loom weights, hammer-stones, hones, knives and scrapers for leather-working and basketmaking, combs, ointment mortars, receptacles for the kohl with which the women darkened their eyelids. On this level also were tombs which had sunk through the silt from the Eighth Level: wooden coffins with their skeletons undisturbed, buried in graves lined by mud bricks. In these tombs were rosettes and beads of gold (the most ancient fabricated gold ever discovered) ; weapons, seals, vessels of obsidian; a wolf's head of electrum (gold & silver alloy); shell beads and such semiprecious stones as carnelian, turquoise and lapis lazuli. One tomb contained 25,000 beads which the diggers assumed were once part of a single beadwork jacket.

Last week sketchy reports reached Aleppo in Syria that Mr. Bache had penetrated the Twelfth Level, representing a town of minor importance, was starting to excavate the Thirteenth Level, a town which he called "P Prlent" and which he believed was built 6,000 years before Christ. It was thus older than Ur by 2,000 years.

France. The famed megalithic stones of Carnac in Brittany have been closely studied for more than a century. There are long rows of menhirs (stone pillars ranging up to 60 ft. in height), dolmens (covered burial cairns) and cromlechs (arcs or circles of stones). Once erroneously ascribed to secret rites of the Celtic Druids, they are now known to have been left by a wiry, long-headed people of the late Stone Age who gave way to the metal-wielding Gauls. They buried or cremated their dead and the stones evidently served some ritual or memorial purpose. Last month Professor Andre Guenin, cataloguing Brittany's megaliths, took the trouble to climb a 100-ft. butte ten miles from Carnac, found an unknown group of monuments including an elliptical cromlech and five dolmens, three of them almost perfectly preserved. One immense dolmen consisted of 19 pillars covered by five table stones. Professor Guenin found traces of a campsite, started digging for human remains.

California. Fossils of two extinct species were found for the first time on the Pacific slope. One, announced by Dr. Chester Stock of Caltech, was a titanothere --a vegetarian mammal of 30,000,000 years ago, larger than an Indian elephant, which grew a preposterously thick and spreading horn from its snout and browsed with its lips because its front teeth were useless. The other fossil was the skull of a 20-ft. whale which 15,000,000 years ago had a three-foot beak. It was discovered by University of California undergraduates while doing field work in entomology. The beak was missing.

Italy. The Circus Maximus of ancient Rome was first a vast, open field, later a tiered U-shaped structure built of wood. So many fires broke out in the stables and contestants' quarters that in the 2nd Century B. C. it was reconstructed of stone from the quarries of Tibur--a light stone that turned a rich ochre with age. In the Middle Ages the Circus was buried by silt from the hills, and sheds and hovels were built on top of it. Now Fascist Italy, recalling the bellicose glories of her antiquity, has decided to lay bare the Circus. The sheds, hovels and a gas works have been razed, and removal has started of 800,000 cubic yards of sediment, all by hand labor. When the clearing is finished a great pageant of manly sport will be held in the arena, no doubt under the Caesarean eye of Benito Mussolini.

Honduras. While tatterdemalion Christians sought refuge in the catacombs beneath Pagan Rome, the Mayas of Central America were spreading from city to city a glittering civilization. One such metropolis was Copan. Archeologists were at work there a half century ago, unearthing elaborately carved steles and sacrificial altars. Last year earthquakes rocked the region, sent some of the ruins tumbling into the Copan River. At the invitation of the Honduras Government, a commission from the Carnegie Institution of Washington arrived last month to undertake restoration and protection. Behind a collapsed wall Head Commissioner Gustav Stromsvik was startled to find stone staircases leading down to subterranean galleries never before suspected. There were cruciform rooms with floors painted scarlet, amphitheatres containing monoliths and tinted statues with bead collars, canals and sewage systems connecting underground buildings. At the feet of a towering statue of a warrior, Mr. Stromsvik found a pair of exquisitely wrought boots of pure gold, two inches high.

U. S. S. R. A farmer digging a cellar near Irkutsk made a find which brought Soviet archeologists on the run. In ground which they called 30,000 years old, they found the skeleton of a young child wearing a necklace of bone beads. From the necklace depended a small plaque apparently carved from a mammoth tusk and bearing the image of three entwined snakes. Nearby were bone weapons and 20 bone images of women, perhaps goddesses. Archeologists outside Russia doubted the antiquity of the deposit, principally because even the crudest bone weapons had not come to light before the late Paleolithic period (20,000 B. C.).

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