Science: The Diggers

Little bands of men roaming over the earth, poking in caves, pits, mounds, quarries, buttes for vestiges of the creatures that roamed the earth before them. Bigger bands of men examining maps, bringing steam shovels, excavating whole dead civilizations. Millions of dollars spent in digging every year. . . . Following are significant efforts and exhumations of the past few months in the Western Hemisphere:

In California, Ethnologist J. P. Harrington of the Smithsonian Institution sought to aid archeological Americana by questioning old, feeble Indians possessed of knowledge of their race's ancient settlements. One Francisco Laus rode with Mr. Harrington into Lost Valley and showed him, among other sites, a spot where Indians once caught eagles by lowering a brave down the face of a cliff in a rabbit-net made of red milkweed fibre. Down the Canada de las Uvas, (little canon of the grapes) one Angel Cuilpe, aged 104, showed him traces of wigwam towns; in Palm Canyon, one Juanito Razon, over 100, guided to ancient water holes, painted rocks, caves, sacred stones, magic springs.

In the Grand Canyon, R. Milton Fulle, tall blond Princeton senior, spent his Christmas vacation on a self-directed geology trip; discovered and photographed what his professors believe to be the four-inch footprints of an ancestor of modern frogs and salamanders, one of earth's first vertebrates.

At Linton, N. D., swellings and a bulge in the earth were identified by inhabitants as the first traces of Mound Builders to be discovered in their state. A tumulus seemed to be the temple mound, and two serpentine ridges— 400 and 600 feet long, containing human bones—the burial mounds, of a settlement beside Beaver Creek that had crossed that stream for its rites of lustration before human sacrifices and burials. The effigies were much like the largest serpent mounds yet discovered (in Ohio).

At Fairfax, Mo., Frank Plumb, anthropologist, unearthed a skeleton measuring 7 feet 2 inches with a low, slanting skull that suggested the Mayan custom of flattening infants' heads; with a pear-shaped stone inside it such as the Mayans put in the mouths of their dead; with a bit of pottery nearby and a translucent stone carved with a Mayan figure.

Golconda, Ill., yielded a 17-foot mastodon spine from four yards of mud on the Ohio River bank.

At Phoenix, Ariz., excavations in La Ciudad, a pueblo ruin, continued under Archeologist Erick Schmidt of the American Museum of Natural History. Rewards: carved shells, pottery, arrowheads, grinding stones, two skeletons thought to be those of the race of Canal-Builders who first irrigated the Salt River valley.