Science: 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 recent weeks:

In France and Spain. The Mediterranean region has long been a fertile field for the archeologist's shovel. Although many Stone Age relics have been unearthed there, they have been somewhat neglected for findings of the more brilliant Minoan, Egyptian, Grecian and Roman periods. Feeling that prehistoric man was much smarter than is commonly believed, Charles Gates Dawes, banker, musician, ambassador and archeologist, has been taking a holiday in France and Spain to co-ordinate Stone Age findings. With him went Professor George Grant MacCurdy of Yale University, director of the American School of Prehistoric Research in Europe and Addison L. Green, chairman of that school's board of trustees. Professor MacCurdy did most of the coordinating.

Mr. Dawes & friends wandered last fortnight into the Dordogne section of southwestern France, to clamber about the rocks of the Vezere valley, penetrated dark caves and troglodytic dwellings. Traveling from there into northern Spain, the party went to Santander, to visit Altamira Cavern and study the famed Paleolithic frescoes painted with mineral oxides, the bison engravings cut into rock. Then Mr. Dawes visited the National Archeological Museum and the Museum of Natural History in Madrid. Headquarters of the expedition in Spain was in the southern province of Huelva.

In the Mediterranean. Halfway between Persia and Egypt, near Loadikies, an old Greek colony, F. A. Schaeffer and Georges Chenet, French archeologists, found the unwieldy schoolbooks of a forgotten university. The books were clay tablets 4,000 years old covered with language lessons in four tongues: Assyro-Chaldean cuneiforms, the language of old time diplomats; Sumerian, the language of scientists; Phoenician, the language of the maritime merchants; and an unknown tongue. Other tablets had Egyptian and Hittite inscriptions. Where the schoolbooks were found, according to the inscriptions which scientists could read, existed a University City called Zapuna, a midpoint joining Mycenaean, Egyptian & Babylonian cultures. There ancient scholars exchanged languages, ideas.

In Colorado. In the ancient untouched Lowry Ruins of southwestern Colorado, an expedition has been digging under the direction of Dr. Paul S. Martin, assistant curator of the Field Museum, Chicago. Cutting into the mounds, scientists found the houses and pottery of three highly developed Indian tribes built one on top of the other. Ten men throwing out 21 tons of debris per day cleared out a