Word: lumley
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...Henry de Lumley, who has led many teams of volunteer explorers into the valley during snow-free summer months, believes that the primitive art was inscribed between 1800 B.C. and 1500 B.C. Thus the carvings belong "not to prehistory but to protohistory-that period of roughly 2,000 years between prehistoric times and recorded history." De Lumley's dating involved shrewd detective work in museums. The short, triangular dagger blades portrayed in many of the engravings, for instance, closely resemble artifacts already identified as products of early Bronze Age (1800 B.C.-1500 B.C.) civilizations in the Rhone Valley...
...engravings include a rich but baffling array of symbols. The most frequently recurring images are horned figures-what De Lumley calls "stylized cattle." There are also daggers, crosslike inscriptions, stars and geometric forms, all of which may have had religious significance. Only a few hundred of the 37,000 engravings catalogued thus far portray human figures: one example, known as the "Chief of the Tribe," shows a man formed almost entirely out of horn symbols...
With the aid of a computer at the University of Aix-Marseille, De Lumley hopes eventually to index all of the valley's more than 200,000 engravings. That could help him to interpret the obscure symbols and learn more about the men who carved them. All that he will say now is that the valley "appears to have been a sacred place in the Bronze Age. But by the beginning of the first millennium (100 B.C.), its message was lost...
...being threatened by an onslaught of tourists and souvenir hunters who use chalk or abrasive stone on the engravings to make them stand out more clearly for snapshots. Some vandals have even hacked engravings out of rock faces or carted off entire slabs. "If this keeps up," De Lumley warns, "in 50 years the Valley of Marvels, the most remarkable cultural treasure of the Alps, will have been destroyed...
...league leaders in defense. As of last week, Tony was the stingiest regular N.H.L. goalie, with an average of only 2.26 goals-against per game and eleven shutouts-just two shy of the modern record set in the 1953-54 season by the Toronto Maple Leafs' Harry Lumley...