Word: wymer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Every weekend, rain or shine, whenever the ground is not frozen. Commercial Artist Bertram Wymer, 65, his wife Lea and their son John tramp across a deserted gravel pit at Swanscombe on the down-Thames outskirts of London. They walk with their heads down, eying every pebble. At the far end of the pit they enter a wire-fenced enclosure and start digging cautiously with garden trowels. They have been digging diligently ever since the end of the war, and recently they made the first finds of a peculiar treasure they have long sought...
Ever since Marston's find, diggers have haunted Barnfield Pit. Most persistent haunters were the Wymers. Bertram Wymer had been digging for antiquities since he was 19. His wife adopted his hobby on their honeymoon, and son John started digging as soon as he was old enough to handle a small trowel. In Barnfield Pit they found plenty of crude flint tools, but for years neither they nor other diggers found anything very interesting. The great prizes-more bones of "the first Englishman" or clues to the life he led-did not show up in hundreds of tons...
Home Fires. The Wymer family kept on digging, now modestly backed by the British Museum of Natural History ($140) and New York's Wenner-Gren Foundation ($250). With the help of two hired laborers, they found buckets of flint chips, tools and animal bones. Then Lea Wymer found something odd in the same deep stratum: a bit of black stuff the size of her fingernail which looked like rock but felt much lighter. A few days later she and Bertram and John all found more. They took the collection to Dr. Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum of Natural...