Diggers

From about the time Julius Caesar was a problem child, Baiae, a few miles north of modern Naples, was Rome's ritziest seaside resort. There the patricians, attracted by the hot springs which gushed from the hillsides, built their sumptuous villas on terraces cut in the slope. Elaborate baths (hot and cold swimming pools with steam rooms, massage and floor shows) cleansed and entertained vacationing senators and consuls. The place acquired a highly questionable reputation. The dramatist Terence wrote: "At Baiae one never knows what the night will bring," and the poet Propertius warned his girl friend that "The waters of Baiae lead to immoral love." At Baiae Nero built the biggest bath, and a vast covered pool. Here he also tried to drown his mother.*

As Rome decayed, Baiae (now Baia) became a scraggly village below a vineyard-covered slope with a few resistant ruins poking out of the soil. Antiquarians knew for centuries that fascinating things must lie under the vine roots, but there was little digging. The vineyard owners would not sell their land, until at last, under Mussolini, who would have appreciated the Roman Baiae, the vineyards were expropriated and turned over to the diggers.

Last week Archaeologist Amadeo Maiuri of the National Museum in Naples formally opened to the public a partially excavated Baiae. During 1,500 years, many feet of soil had crept down the slope or been nudged down by earthquakes. When this was dug away, some of the splendors of the gaudy resort emerged fairly intact. Facing the sea are 300 yards of villas and terraces. Some of their walls are still covered with paintings of nymphs and satyrs. Two marble and ceramic staircases lead to the upper terraces. Other finds: shower rooms, sculptures of amazons and a Venus, a small theater, three bath houses (one, 90 feet in diameter, shows a large apse open to the sun, presumably for ancient tan-seekers).

"At Pompeii," said Archaeologist Maiuri, "we see the Romans' daily life. At Baiae we see how the Roman aristocracy lived and lusted."

At a less elegant spot, Ralph Solecki of the Smithsonian Institution was digging into an even more distant past. Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq is still inhabited during the winter months by about 40 Kurds and their flocks and herds. Last year Solecki became interested in the debris on the cave's floor. Back at Shanidar early this year, financed by a Fulbright grant and surrounded by fascinated Kurds, Archaeologist Solecki carefully dug a square shaft in the promising deposit. The top layers were modern. Just below, he found tools and fragments of pottery from the "historic period" when Shanidar belonged to the Persians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians or the Turks. Below this layer, metal relics gradually disappeared. Stone tools took their place, and the pottery shards grew simpler and cruder. At four feet below the present floor, Solecki left the New Stone Age and passed in a couple of feet of digging into the Old Stone Age, which probably ended in Iraq about 10,000 years ago.

Under the curious eyes of the cave's living tenants, the shaft sank, foot after foot, toward the dimmest beginnings of human history. Subtle changes in bits of stone, covered by the garbage of ancient man, told of the shifts of culture. Solecki spent many feet of digging in the Aurignacian period (of the well-built Cro-Magnon men). Then he entered the Mousterian period (of the Neanderthal men, stooped and beetle-browed). At 26 feet below the surface, he found the scattered bones of a child less than a year old who had died something like 70,000 years ago. The child had lain there while dirt, rubbish and broken utensils covered it deeper and deeper. The whole sweep of human development was enacted over its skull, culminating at last in modern technological man: Ralph Solecki of the Smithsonian.

* In 59 A.D., Nero invited his mother Agrippina to Baiae. On her way home she narrowly escaped death when her ship, obviously sabotaged, sank from under her; after she got home, Nero--egged on by his mistress Poppaea, who disliked the lady--used the surer method of having Agrippina clubbed and stabbed to death.

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