Science: The Diggers

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In Nevada, an expedition from the Museum of the American Indian (Manhattan), called in by Governor James Graves Scrugham to examine the great cliff city (Pueblo Grande de Nevada) which he had discovered personally (TIME, March 23, 1925), threw up sand all winter over a stretch six miles long, baring abodes ranging from scooped-out hollows in the earth to extensive stone apartment-buildings that sheltered whole clans; bringing the number of skeletons found to 56, some wrapped in pink, purple and blue shrouds of soft texture, with turquoise, stone and shell ornaments littered near. In the Mountain of the Mother of Salt, a sand-strewn salt-hill several hundred feet high twelve miles from Pueblo Grande, a cave 140 feet deep and 50 wide sparkled brilliantly under the explorers' flashlights. They found stone hammers with the wooden handles preserved, bits of sandals, creosote-brush torches, even thousands of corncobs remaining from meals eaten by the prehistoric salt-miners, and hundreds of quids of a gummy plant chewed between meals. The explorers hoped to find mummies in this cave, the saline air of which might have preserved them better than all the oils and ointments of Egypt. The artifacts found seemed to date Pueblo Grande before the Aztec culture which Cortez and other Spaniards found flourishing in Mexico and the Southwest in the 16th Century.

At Princeton University, Geologist B. F. Howell announced that a tiny fossil fishplate (scale) which he had picked the previous summer out of Cambrian strata in Franklin County, Vt., had been identified as belonging to a primitive fish, the earliest known creature to possess a notochord (rudimentary spine), which swam in the days of trilobites and brachiopods as the then (over 50 million years ago) highest form of animal life. Fellow scientists named the scale in honor of its discoverer "Howell's dawn fish," marking the dawn of vertebrate life.

Tucson, Ariz., was thrilled when, in an old limekiln on Silver Bell Road, cast lead swords and crosses were unearthed, bearing inscriptions in Latin and Hebrew, whose face value indicated that Roman Jews had penetrated to Arizona in 760 A. D. and founded a kingdom lasting into the Tenth Century. Mormons rejoiced, saying that this chronology coincided with their sacred accounts of the Lamanites, a lost tribe of Israel, whose religion Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were divinely commanded to resurrect. Historians viewed askance the use of the initials "A.D." (Anno Domini) in the inscriptions. This calendar term was first suggested in 775 by the English scholiast, Bede; came into general use about 1000. In January, a retired cattleman of Tucson told of an educated young Mexican sculptor, Timotio Odohui, who had lived with his parents at the limekiln 40 years ago and molded articles in a soft metallic alloy much like lead. Odohui had had a library containing classic tomes and it was noted that the words used in the inscriptions were all discoverable in a glossary of foreign words and phrases.