Word: ceramics
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Died. C.W. Ceram, 57, German journalist and author whose 1949 history of archaeology, Gods, Graves and Scholars, became an international bestseller; of heart disease; in Hamburg. A book and drama critic during the early '30s, he switched to the less political field of art history when the Nazis came to power. He joined the Wehrmacht in World War II, was captured by the Americans, and developed his interest in archaeology while a prisoner of war. For Gods' publication, he reversed and Anglicized his real name, Kurt W. Marek. The book sold more than 4,000,000 copies...
More than a decade ago, C.W. Ceram, celebrated popular explicator of archaeology (Gods, Graves and Scholars), decided to abandon his "hobby." He would, he said, return to other subjects and write once more under his real name, Kurt W. Marek. Happily, the German-born journalist and critic, after allowing Marek a couple of bylines, could not vanquish Ceram entirely. In The First American, Ceram/Marek is back in his old haunts, providing once more a loving, readable, penetrating excavation of antiquity, this time in the New World, where he has settled. The Old World's overlay of monuments and documents...
This was the approximate time of Ceram's First American, or at least the earliest inhabitant that archaeologists and paleontologists can tell us much about. Miss Laguna herself yielded little information. The subsequent discovery in the Southwest of the flint weapons left behind by the Folsom man and the Sandia man provide more. No bones of these ancients have turned up, but the speared skeletons of their prey from 10,000 or more years ago convey messages. The fact that the tailbones of the giant bison were missing, for instance, suggests that the entire hides were taken, along with...
Those Who Vanished. Closer to the historical era, comparisons can be made between early Americans and their Old World contemporaries. Ceram tells of the work of Emil Walter Haury, a young field archaeologist in the 1930s who explored a site at Snaketown, Ariz. The Pima Indians said that it once belonged to the "Hohokam" ("those who have vanished"). Haury confirmed that the artistic Hohokam seem to have invented etching around A.D. 1000, hundreds of years before it appeared in Europe. Instead of using metal, they worked with seashells. They cremated their dead, methodically smashing whatever artifacts they had possessed...
...Ceram moves from one age to another, pointing out links and gaps. He does not pretend that he is reporting new findings. His mission, rather, is to collect and explain what the scientists have produced. He brings to it an excitement born of the knowledge that new discoveries can be made at any moment that will tell much about the previous tenants of the continent...