Science: Diggers

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Plagued Villages. Early explorers told tall tales about fortified villages of agricultural Indians along the Missouri River. By the time the permanent white settlers flooded into Nebraska a few generations later, these people had almost vanished. Then the region was dominated by the fierce, nomadic Dakotas, a branch of the Sioux that had formerly been of minor importance. Archaeologists of the Smithsonian Institution, racing to beat the great dams rising along the Missouri, have been excavating Indian sites on the river bottoms. They now confirm the old tall tales.

The thing that finished off the early agricultural Indians was smallpox. The villagers along the river—the Mandans, Hidatsa, Arikara, et al.—held off nomadic enemies by means of their greater numbers, their fortifications and their superior culture. But when the first whites brought smallpox, the Indians were especially vulnerable. The plague swept through their densely built-up villages and killed most of their inhabitants. The Sioux were not hit as hard. When the disease appeared, the Sioux scattered, each family for itself, until the epidemic had subsided. Then, still strong, the nomads attacked the weakened villages and destroyed most of the survivors.

This is an old story to frontier historians, but until recently archaeologists have not known how many Indians had settled in pre-smallpox days along the Missouri River. The Smithsonian men have already found the sites of 500 sizable fortified villages, some of them with 400 lodges inside their walls. Had it not been for smallpox, the early settlers would have been tough adversaries for the wandering Sioux.

Smallpox leaves no marks on the bones of its victims, but the diggers found one grisly relic of the pestilence. A frontier tale has it that the plague-stricken Indians tossed their dead into food storage pits. The diggers excavated such a pit and found jumbled skeletons in it.

Celtic Queen. "The Greeks wrote all the histories," says an academic proverb, "and gave themselves all the breaks." During their peak, the Greeks described western Europe as inhabited chiefly by unseemly savages. This ancient triumph of propaganda was somewhat damaged recently when Rene Joffroy, professor of philosophy and an ardent archaeologist, dug into a Celtic tomb near Chatillon-sur-Seine in eastern France.

Joffroy had long suspected that there might be tombs in his neighborhood, but for years he could find no trace of one. This year he came across some stones plowed up by farmers, and his practiced eye told him that they were the lower layer of a Celtic burial mound about 40 yards in diameter. The rest of the mound, he thinks, was probably used by invading Romans to build a nearby road.

He organized a digging party and cut a trench. In the center of the base of the mound, he found a caved-in shaft three yards in diameter. As the dirt that had fallen into it was carefully scratched away, treasure after treasure came to light.

First came an enormous bronze "crater" (vase) weighing 350 lbs. On its handles were busts of gorgons intertwined with snakes. There were also sculptured horsemen, chariots and foot soldiers. The crater is probably Greek, but its conical lid with the statue of a robed woman is more archaic.