Diggers

Whenever U.S. archaeologists succeed in extending backwards the length of time that human beings have lived in North America, their European colleagues go them one better. Archaeologist James A. Ford recently reported traces of human settlement in northern Louisiana that he reckons to be 2,700 years old. Last week Professor Alberto Carlo Blanc announced the discovery of man-made tools near Rome "over 200,000 years old."

Six-Ringed City. The U.S. find was at Poverty Point, now on Louisiana's sluggish Bayou Macon. The site has been recognized as man-made for 50 years, but its real character escaped appreciation until Professor Ford got air photos from Army engineers. By 500 B.C., says Ford in Natural History, thousands of Indians or pre-Indians were living at Poverty Point in a carefully laid-out city. They honored their gods by building enormous temple mounds vaguely in the shape of a bird. Six concentric octagons of different-colored soil showed up on the air photos; on closer examination, they turned out to be low ridges, laid out like city streets around a central plaza. The ridges look like defensive works, but Ford thinks they were built for people to live on. Their total length is 11.2 miles, and when newly built, they must have contained more than 530,000 cubic yards of earth.

Ford and a crew of local laborers dug deep into Poverty Point. By carbon-14 dating, they determined that the city was first settled about 800 B.C. Its gamehunting people used spear-throwing sticks and bolas (clusters of stone weights). They had a little pottery of poor quality.

Correlating his information, Ford could reconstruct the history of Poverty Point. As early as 10,000 years ago, he says, a very primitive people lived in the region. They left few relics except crude stone weapons. Then, about 1000 B.C., people of superior culture must have come down from the north. They made beautiful flint spearheads, knew how to work copper.

These cultural traits closely resemble those of tribes that lived in Northern Asia several thousand years ago. So Ford thinks that Asians crossed the Bering Strait before the time of Homer and eventually reached Louisiana. They may have conquered the primitives, imposed their religion upon them and forced them to build temples honoring a bird god.

Prehistoric Pompeii. Professor Blanc's discovery near Rome not only predates Homer but may even date back to Java man, who roamed the Southeast Asiatic area in the early part of the glacial epoch. A professor of human paleontology at the

University of Rome, Blanc hit upon the Torre site by accident. In the grass at the bottom of a hill 13 miles northwest of the Colosseum, he picked up a curious object that turned out to be the fossilized tooth of a prehistoric elephant. Professor Blanc borrowed a fleet of bulldozers and scraped until, 138 feet down, he exposed the remains of a primitive campsite strewn with hand axes and stone flakes. Many of the bones of the deer, elephants and horses that lay alongside had been cracked open by the hand-ax wielders, apparently in their search for the nutritive marrow.

The level below the hand-ax layer contained mollusks that lived during one of the interglacial warm periods. The hand-ax layer itself was sprinkled with black pumice, a sure sign of volcanic activity. As Professor Blanc reconstructs it, the earliest Romans lived in a moderately warm climate on the shore of a vast lagoon that.covered the present site of Rome. The Torre site may establish what has long been suspected by Italian paleontologists: that Central Italy is one of earth's oldest inhabited places. Confirmation of this theory depends on Blanc's efforts to find human bones to match the man-made axes. After exploring only a fraction of the Torre site, Blanc says optimistically: "This place is a kind of prehistoric Pompeii. Something, presumably sudden flood or volcanic material, forced these people to leave in a hurry. I know it's unchristian of me, but I can't help hoping that one of them got caught."

* Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals.

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