Rocky Hillside Research Articles

ウン・マル・アマッド発掘報告書の再検討

Umm el-'Amed on the Ladder of Tyre has had a long history of archaeological research since the days of M. de Vogüé and E. Renan. The latest investigation was done in 1944/5 by the French expedition under the direction of MM. Dunand and Duru. An account of the results appeared in 1962 (“Umm el-'amed, une ville de l'époque hellénistique aux échelles de Tyr”).Quite contrary to the allusion of the subtitle, the description was given only to two Phoenician temples of the site (Temple de Milk-'Ashtart and Temple Est), while we can not know anything about the Hellenistic town itself. If the latter were fully described, this book would contribute very much to our knowledge about the Hellenistic age of the Phoenician civilization.In this brief survey of the report I examined the evidences of the Temple de Milk-'Ashtart, which the excavators dug most elaborately and whose account in the report is tolerably satisfactory, so that we can follow the stratigraphical context and reconstruct the history of the building. (For instance, several deep soundings to the bed-rock were done only in the site of this temple.)I discussed here architectural remains, coins, lamps, inscriptions and decorated pottery, which were able to be stratigraphically reassessed. The result is the following picture of the history of the Temple de Milk-'ashtart:-In the earliest Hellenistic period, or even before that, some unidentified walls existed at the rocky hillside of the site. They may have been parts of certain sacred installation, which was situated just at the side of the road going eastward up to the town from the coastal main road between Accho and Tyre. Next, about at the end of the reign of Ptolemy II, a period of great construction came. The site was terraced horizontally with imported soil, and upon this terraced platform the devotees of Phoenician gods planned a rectangular temple with a cella in the centre and with a court, porticos and small rooms. By the year of 222/1 B. C. the construction work was finally completed with putting the beautiful pavement of stoneslabs in the court. From that time onward no major alterations happened, but even after the Roman conquest of Syria the Temple seems to have been frequented: this is able to be inferred from the decorated wares of that period (for instance, Terra Sigillata and Arretine), which came from the Temple site.

Test Labs Hold Space Secrets

> NO OTHER MAJOR scientific program in the United States is as exposed to the public eye as the race to the moon. But even that has its secrets. But the few that remain are kept in 1,700 acres of steep, craggy hills, insulated from the rest of the world by miles of undrivable, winding roads, interrupted by several security check points. In 18 huge test stands, literally carved out of the rocky hillside in Santa Susana, Calif., many of the engines that will carry the first Americans to the moon are developed and tested. The three-stage Saturn V booster that will power the lunar flight will contain 92 rocket engines of various shapes and sizes. These will range from the tiny attitude control motors built into the Apollo spacecraft itself and capable of being turned on or off in one-sixtieth of a second, to the huge, first-stage main engines, three times as high as a man, which produce 1.5 million pounds of thrust. Scene of all this testing is the Santa Susana Field Laboratory of North American Aviation, Inc.'s Rocketdyne division. Since 1950 there have been some 270,000 test firings of engines and components. The rocky crags are quite photogenic. In fact, the laboratory used to be a favorite setting for Hollywood movie crews, who regularly made the 30-mile trek from Los Angeles to film Westerns. A test firing is quite a spectacle. Often the first sign visible to observers in blockhouses hundreds or even thousands of feet away is a huge cloud of steam. This does not come from the rocket at all, but from water used for cooling. The first sound, the initial shock wave, is as abrupt as a slap in the face, followed by a continuous roar that never lasts more than a few hundred seconds. The first large contract ever issued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was for the F-i engine, five of which will power the first stage of the Saturn V moon rocket. Developed by Rocketdyne, the F-i1 now produces roughly 10 times as much thrust as was indicated by its original design. * Science News, 89:391 May 27, 1966 391

Observations on a Domesticated Peruvian Desert Fox, Dusicyon

The following observations were made while Mrs. Birdseye and I were living at the Hacienda Paramonga, on the Inter-American Highway 192 kilometers north of Lima, Peru. The Hacienda comprises a large sugar estate occupying the irrigated, combined lower valleys of the Pativilca and Fortaleza rivers. On the west the estate is washed by the Pacific Ocean, on the north and south it is sharply cut off by the nearly plantless desert, and on the east it ascends the river valleys into the dry and rocky foothills of the Andes. The region is rainless but humid, and heavy mists, particularly during the winter, cause total annual precipitation of about one inch. Dusicyon abounds in this section of the Peruvian coast, being equally at home in the rich cultivated areas, the nearly lifeless desert, the foothills and the bird-rich beaches. It is largely nocturnal and is frequently seen in car headlights, but I have never seen a car-killed fox. Food of course varies with habitat: rodents, insects, small birds and eggs, poultry once in a while, and such fruits as bananas, guavas, chitimoyas, grapes, papayas and mangoes in cultivated areas; crabs, dead fish and sea birds on the beaches, and the eggs and young of sea birds in the rookeries. What these foxes eat and drink in the waterless and semi-lifeless deserts I cannot guess, except that lizards are more or less available everywhere. All the young foxes—three litters—with which we have personally come into contact have been born in October or November, and at least one litter was dug from a rocky hillside on the edge of irrigated fields given over to sugar cane and bananas. In late November, 1953, three Dusicyon pups, freshly dug from a hillside den, were offered to the Chief Engineer of Paramonga and refused. My wife …

An Interesting Fern Rust New to the United States

On May 21, 1927, several members of the Department of Botany of the Pennsylvania State College, while botanizing on a rocky hillside near Howard, Pennsylvania, found a wonderfully fine stand of the common polypody, Polypodium vulgare L. Literally hundreds of these ferns, in fact almost every one examined, had been attacked by a rust, which was fruiting in great abundance on the over-wintered and in many instances producing very noticeable necrosis. A rust on Polypodium vulgare has been described by Bell,1 from Ontario, Canada, who noted its occurrence on fronds of the previous summer, and named it Uredinopsis polypodophila. Bell also suggested the possible connection of this rust with a Peridermium on the 2-8-year-old leaves of Abies balsamea which he found in close association with the fern rust and to which he