CITY 10,000 YEARS OLD.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 156, 30 December 1911, Page 9 (Supplement)

CITY 10,000 YEARS OLD.

Still another "oldest city in the world" has boon discovered. When T. Hewett My ring found vases in Peru in ruins which were said to be 7000 years old it is imagined that the remains of early civilisation had been pushed as far back into antiquity as they would ever go, remarks an American journal. But A. Lafavc, a mining engineer, has found the

relics of a town in an Arizona tableland' near Phoenix which he insists are at least 10,000 years old. The buildings are on a levol stretch of country where neither silt nor wash was possible and yet the ruins were covered with ten feet of prairie dust, which the discoverer declares required ages to accumulate. The buildings of sandstone show great architeetm ! skill, and in the walls were found a box .of cotton balls and a sealed jar of com, both well preserved. The. Arizona climate does not permit the growth of cotton in the present age, so Mr. Lafavc. assumes that sufficient time must have elapsed since the cotton which he found was grown to wrought a complete change in the character of the country. The period he nlso gauges as something like,lo,ooo years. He is satislied that the ruins are older than those ..of Nineveh or Babylon. He believes that the race which built this town was possessed of high civilisation from the abundance of artistically wrought pottery, and that it subsequently was broken up by internal dissension and possibly degenerated into cliff-dwelling peoples. *