Word: desertic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...oldest New World building yet discovered lay in the California sunshine last week. Amateur Archaeologist C. D. McCown was troweling away at the camp site of Pinto Man found eight months ago in the hot Mojave Desert (TIME, May 31). Under the dry surface he came on what looked like a pesthole. The wood of the post had disappeared thousands of years ago, but in its place was sand contrasting with the undisturbed earth around it. Other diggers downed their tools and hurried up excitedly; such filled-in postholes are treasures in archaeology...
Curator Mark Harrington of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, considers the house "the most interesting and exciting Pinto Man discovery to date." He thinks it was built about 8,000 years ago, when the Mojave Desert was a wooded, fertile land, teeming with game. The people who lived in it were obviously no mere nomads, but led a semi-settled life, probably living in tight little clans. No cooking had been done in the house, but near it was the charcoal and burned-bone fragments of a large campfire site, apparently shared by several families...
Sole Winner. At week's end, the fighting was still scattered and sporadic. On the Arab side, Egyptians (in the southern desert) and Syrians and Iraqis (in Galilee) were most active. Abdullah's Arab Legion, the only force likely to cause Israel serious trouble, had done little but engage in an artillery and mortar duel with Jewish forces in Jerusalem. In a night attack the Jews won Lydda Airport, biggest in Palestine. Later they captured, after surprisingly feeble Arab resistance, the towns of Lydda and Ramleh, and threatened Arab positions blocking the lifeline road to Jerusalem. Abdullah...
...independent was Independent? Ten U.S. oil companies ponied up its $10 million capital. The State Department smoothed the path to the Sheikh of Kuweit, joint owner with Saudi Arabia's Ibn Saud of the Arabian desert's "neutral zone," where Independent's oil concession lies. State also passed the word that Independent was its chosen instrument for the "neutral zone" oil lands. And Arabian American Oil Co., in neighboring Saudi Arabia, was ready to let Independent use the projected 1,100-mile pipeline to the Mediterranean...
...Pagodas. The son of a poor Czech goldsmith, Oskar Kokoschka briefly earned a living decorating fans and postcards, or betting U.S. tourists he could drink them under the table. His formal education was slight, "acquired through reading under my school desk. Therefore my intellect resembles a Tibetan desert, with a few pagodas here & there." During World War I, he achieved a brief respectability by joining the dragoons, because he liked the uniform. But he always kept his private pledge: never to shoot the enemy...