Word: pits
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Attracted by pottery fragments to a low mound with the native name of M'lefaat, the diggers found relatively recent remains in the upper layers of dirt. Farther down they found something entirely different: filled-in pit houses rather like those that American Indians were building about the time of Columbus. Some of the houses had circular walls of mortarless stone and floors covered with hardpacked pebbles. Inside were crude hearths...
...with the pit houses were stone implements, including axes, mortars and pestles; but more interesting to the archaeologists were the things they did not find. There were no flint-edged sickles, no pottery, no decorative work of any kind. All these items were plentiful in the next-oldest village (Jarmo) that the Chicago diggers found in 1948. 100 miles from M'lefaat. So the people who lived in the pit houses must have been much cruder than the neighboring Jarmo people, who are believed to have founded their village 7,000 years...
...Braidwood is not sure whether the pit-house dwellers were truly agricultural. Their mortars proved that they ground some sort of grain, but they may have collected wild seeds instead of planting crops. He hopes to have some sort of answer to this question after the dirt of M'lefaat has been sifted for fragments of grain and other meaningful trifles. Even without this evidence, it looks as if M'lefaat may be one of man's earliest attempts to live in a permanent community...
...refuse to work for the state on the grounds of conscience. Among them are the monashki, devoted religious women who normally might have been nuns. Dr. Joseph Scholmer, a German M.D. who spent 3½ years in the camp, attended a religious service in one of the mine pits worked by Lithuanians: "We walked down passages that were full of people and eventually came to a disused gallery which ended in a little crypt. About 20 men had collected there. All were standing in silence: they were sunk in prayer. They felt quite safe here. No soldier who values...
...wall-Pravda, the prisoners read of the insurrection in East Germany. Resistance was so open that on July 22, 1953 Vorkuta Commander General Derevyanko made a speech in one troublesome barracks. A Lithuanian interrupted: "I am sick of just working, working until I drop dead in the pit or the tundra sucks me up." Said Derevyanko: "You do not need freedom in order to live. As a citizen you are only on file [an expression frequently used in Soviet bureaucracy], but as a worker you live." The prisoners made a slogan of the general's words, shouted...