(In its last two issues, TIME reported leading archeological and paleontological events in the Western Hemisphere and in northern Africa in recent months. Herewith the European and Asian fields are covered, the African completed.)
At Giza, Egypt, Dr. George A. Reisner's Harvard-Boston expedition (TIME, March 23, 1925) effected entrance to a burial chamber near the Pyramid of Cheops; deduced from the disposition of furniture and the human remains that it was the reburial place of Cheops' father or mother. Out of a pious desire to have his parent near him in death, the son had moved them.
In Kaoko Veld, on the inaccessible, desert Southwest African coast, Anthropologists C. E. Cadle, Grant H. John and Paul L. Hoefler, financed by Denver business men, found survivors of the Keikum bushmen, "lowest living form of humanity," pigmy creatures, who can communicate among themselves only in tongue-clicks, who have no art left save dances imitating animals, no affairs but hunting food from day to day.
Greece, short of funds, worked out a plan of payments in land for the citizens of its pestilential slum quarter north of the Acropolis at Athens, whom it wished to evict that the greatest excavation in Europe since Pompeii might be made. Last fortnight, this digging finally began. Dr. Edward Capps of Princeton, onetime U. S. minister to Greece, turned the first spadeful of the thousands of tons of earth that will be removed from Athens' ancient Agora, or market place, the site of many temples which, though, looted by conquerors, should still contain many art treasures of the Golden Age. The digging is entirely under the American School of Classical Studies at Athens*; after 30 years or so of labor, the Agora will be given back to Greece, stripped of its 35 feet of debris, for a public park. Dr. Capps also formally opened the Gennadium, a new marble library built by the Carnegie Foundation to house historical documents given to the American School by H. E. Joannes Gennadius, wealthy Attic statesman.
Near Visby, "city of roses and ruins" on Sweden's island, Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, Professor Nils Lithberg came upon the ruins of a city at least 1,500 years old, which gave promise of yielding relics far older, relics of the Bronze and early Iron Ages. Excavations in Visby have turned up dwelling sites 4,000 years old.
In Denmark, diggers in a Slesvig bog, struck whale bones six feet down, unearthed the skeleton of a prehistoric species of leviathan which experts suggested might have been swept to his grave, 24 miles inland, by a tidal wave.
In London, burrowing 100 feet under Lombard Street ("Wall Street of England"), sandhogs rooted out hairpins, brooches, combs, sandals, cosmetic bottles, dainty spoons, ranged along a wall which could be identified, by a Claudian coin, as that of a Roman "beauty shoppe" of about 50 A. D.