IN the United States advantage is being taken of the funds available for the relief of unemployment to carry out certain archæological investigations which hitherto, although considered of great importance, have been regarded as too costly for the resources of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington. The funds are to be provided by the Civil Works Administration and about one thousand men of the local unemployed will be engaged for the work of excavation. According to an announcement issued by the Smithsonian Institution, six Indian mound sites, each considered to be key positions in an archæologically unknown area, are to be explored. In each case the work will be carried put under the direction of an official of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Three sites in Florida will be in charge of Mr. Matthew W. Stirling, chief of the Bureau, one of these being an extensive system of pre-Seminole mounds and earthworks near Lake Oke-chobee which was discovered in 1931; Dr. F. H. H. Roberts, Jr., will excavate a group of mounds in the Shiloh National Military Park at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee; and Dr. W. F. Strong will be in charge of the exploration of a large mound six miles from Taft, Kern County, California, one of the key sites of Californian prehistory, which is known to have been abandoned soon after the first Spaniards reached the country. At Macon, Georgia, a mound thought to be the site of an ancient Hitchi village will be explored. While deploring the circumstances which have made these undertakings possible, archæologists welcome the expenditure of funds in this direction which, it is hoped, will at least make a beginning in putting the archæological exploration of the south-eastern States on the same systematic basis as the exploration of the south-west.
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Nov 14, 1936
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