The Diggers

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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, chiefly in Africa.

In the Sahara, at Hoggar, a band of French and Americans— "Count" Byron Kuhn de Prorok,* Algerian officials, and Trustee W. Bradley Tyrrell of Beloit College (Wis.)—broke into the reputed tomb of Tin Hinan, semi-legendary queen and goddess of the white race of Tuaregs (Berbers). In the crumbling frame of a carved wooden couch lay the six-foot skeleton of a personage, seemingly female, littered with beads, carbuncles, garnets, gold and silver objects, glass balls, with black and yellow designs like eyes. On the arm bones hung massive bracelets—eight on the right, seven on the left—of gold alloyed with copper and some other metal, perhaps antimony, which would link the artifacts definitely with Punic work done at Carthage, on the Sahara's north edge, before its conquest by Rome in 146 B. C. The beads resembled Carthaginian work of the Fourth Century B. C. At the skeleton's ostrich-plumed head rested a six-inch statuet—a naked female with hips exaggerated as in Aurignacian figures of Paleolithic workmanship—which some held to be the famed Libyan Venus, others merely a fetish placed by the burial party for good luck.

The party plowed back across the Sahara, smitten sorely by sand- storms, but not before M. Maurice Reygasse, savant and Governor of the Department of Tebessa, had ingratiated himself with Amenokal Akhamouk, monarch of the Tuaregs (who only a few years ago scourged the desert, slew foreigners), to such an extent that a royal edict was issued to find and lay before white archeologists a manuscript containing, in several hundred sheets of parchment, the only known history of the Tuaregs. This should throw much light on the history of the Punic Carthaginians with whom, it is now established, the Tuaregs traded extensively.

In Paris, journalistic sarcasm was drowned in archeologists' enthusiasm when Digger de Prorok laid his finds before the government. Professor Stephane Gsell of the College of France demonstrated before the Institute of France that Tin Hinan, whose tomb and skeleton he was inclined to believe had been found, could not have lived earlier than 1,000 B. C.; probably about 900 B. C. Others aimed their guesses at her actual date between those two centuries.