Science: DISCOVERIES OF THE PAST

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UNTIL a generation or so ago, most archaeologists were bookish scholars, at home among long-dead languages; they did their best work using ancient records as guidebooks. In this way, Schliemann found Homer's Troy under an undistinguished mound in western Turkey.

The literary approach is still useful, but it breaks down when written records are scarce or nonexistent. To find and interpret remains of people who never dreamed of writing, modern diggers have borrowed techniques from many other sciences. They study airplane photographs for soil disturbance. They analyze their finds chemically and date them by their content of radioactive Carbon 14.

The new methods as well as the old ones are being applied all over the world, from Afghanistan to the Arctic and from Central America to Central Europe. The information that they yield is filling gaps in the long history of human culture.

Paestum Exhumed. The bookish approach scored a triumph at Paestum, 60 miles south of Naples, where Greek empire-builders established a colony in the early 6th century B.C. The city's long history and its conquest by Lucanians and Romans were well known from classical literature, and its walls and colonnades have impressed tourists for centuries, but not until 1951 was there a serious attempt to find what lay beneath the surface. Then Professor P. Claudio Sestieri and a gang of laborers set to work (TIME, Sept. 6). From tombs came vivid paintings on stone of household scenes and fighting gladiators. Last summer Sestieri uncovered a small, completely buried building, made a hole in its roof and lowered himself into the stagnant dimness. He was in the central shrine of Hera, Goddess of Fertility, and patron of Paestum. Jars and vases held solidified honey, sacred to Hera (see opposite page). It is likely that no one had entered that shrine for at least 2,500 years.

Pleistocene Minnehaha. Some 6,000 miles away, on a bleak, dry plain near Midland, Texas, the new-type scientific diggers got a full workout. Their problem was a broken-up skull, found 17 months ago by Keith Glasscock, an amateur archaeologist (TIME, July 12).

The skull fragments were carefully fitted together; they were tested for fluorine, which generally increases with age. Then, diggers financed by the Wenner-Gren Foundation camped by the site to study its dusty geology. By tracing the various layers of red, grey, and white sand, they established that the skull belonged to an individual, most likely a young woman, who lived more than 10,000 years ago. She is almost certainly the oldest American whose bones have been found. This conclusion was backed by the fluorine tests and by the bones of extinct animals found in the sand with the skull.

The Schoolboy Knew. In Egypt the literary approach is still the most useful. Egypt was conquered about 1800 B.C. by the Hyksos, a crude Asian people. Much of the information about this period was suspect because it came from a schoolboy's exercise tablet. Egyptologists debated whether the schoolboy's tale was a partial copy of a grownup text (like copying the Gettysburg Address) or whether it was a patriotic composition out of the boy's own head.