Word: caving
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...unscrupulous reporter (Kirk Douglas) who has been broken from big-city dailies to a job covering the humdrum local news of Albuquerque. Hungering for a break that will send him back to the big time, he stumbles on a disaster reminiscent of the Floyd Collins story of 1925: a cave-in has pinned Leo Minosa, owner of a roadside curio shop, deep in a nearby labyrinth of ancient Indian cliff dwellings...
...Carleton ("Cannonball") Coon, a University of Pennsylvania archaeologist who had made a specialty of Iran, revisited the area around Ghar Hotu.* In semidarkness, assorted Iranian laborers and kibitzers, directed by Dr. Coon and his young (25) Harvard assistant, Louis Dupree, stripped layer after layer from the surface of the cave. At the Iron Age layer they turned up arrowheads, pins and pottery. The Bronze Age yielded javelin heads, rings and vases. Deeper down they found fine painted crocks, and then "software Neolithic," probably the oldest plain Neolithic pottery on record...
Below these layers they went through a large rockfall to hit glacial gravel of the Pleistocene. After the discovery of a rare hand ax, tension in the deep hole grew as thick as the close air below the cave floor. Then, in the sputtering light of a Coleman lamp, the Iranian workmen disinterred the skeletons of the three prehistoric men who had met sudden death there some 75,000 years...
Their digging on the Caspian done for this year, Coon and Dupree are already planning another expedition. Native workmen told them a fabulous tale of immense stone sculpture in another cave, hidden in high, wild mountains to the south. If they can, they will return next year. But time may be running out. Like other scientists, they fear the Russians will take over the "heartland" of archaeology...
...days, according to legend, a man could stand at the cave mouth, shout Ho, wait for a few seconds, and the cave would answer...