Science: Diggers, Jan. 27, 1947

• Share

(3 of 4)

The other Soviet dig is in the Crimea, north of Simferopol. In 1827, a peasant turned up a carved stone. Since then a few diggers have puttered around the site, but not until 1945 did a real dig get going. Soviet archeologists call the place "Neapolis [New City] of the Scythians."

It was apparently a big, rich, fortified town with elaborate tombs, industries and catacombs, which probably clung to the edge of the steppes for several thousand years. It may have been a contact point between Western civilization and the savage nomads of Asia. If so, the world's archeologists would like to hear more about it. But Soviet Digger Pavel Shultz will not tell more until his findings have been printed (if they ever are) in a Soviet publication.

Fossil Punts. In Britain, where amateur archeologists rummage for everything from Piltdown Man to Saxon arrowheads, two Yorkshire brothers struck pay mud in the River Humber. Since boyhood, Ted and William Wright had scoured the country near Hull, looking for likely sites. Best bet, they decided, was a mud bank in the Humber; it ought to be full of interesting stuff washed down the river since ancient days.

Whenever they could spare the time, the brothers waded out at low tide to dig in the gluey brown mud. In 1937, they found three planks which looked old enough for any antiquarian. Between the ebb & flood, the toilers of the Humber dug like inspired muskrats, building a mud wall to protect their find from being washed away by the currents. More planks appeared. Maybe it was a boat? By Jove, it was a boat!

The brothers joined His Majesty's forces in 1939, but the war only slowed their digging. They hurried back to the Humber at every leave to spot, in 1940. a second boat. When they were "demobbed" last year, a corps of enthusiasts joined the sloshy fun, extracted the boats, bore them off for exhibition in London. Experts pronounced them boats of the ancient, blue-dyed Britons, older than Julius Caesar by about 400 years.

The boats are blunt-ended like the punts still popular on conservative British rivers. Forty-five feet long by four feet wide, they were built of four-inch, hewn-oak planks, laced together with yew-fiber ropes, the seams caulked with moss. They showed that the ancient Britons were seagoing (or at least river-going) long before the Romans discovered them.

Pacific Venice. When the U.S. took the mid-Pacific island of Ponape from the Japanese, it fell heir to an unsolved mystery. On a reef off the east coast of the dot-on-the-map island are a great stone fortress and 50 artificial islets. Ponape natives call it Nanmatol, but they shun it superstitiously and have only the flimsiest traditions to explain why people built it.

The main enclosure, 185 ft. long by 115 ft. wide, has thick walls up to 40-ft. high built of basalt columns laid crosswise, rather like the logs of a log cabin. Huge rough steps lead to a courtyard. Inside is another wall, and inside that a stone-roofed vault. The man-made islets are separated by shallow canals, some of them choked with tumbled blocks. The citadel itself is in fair condition, though so overgrown with jungle that few details are visible.