EXCAVATIONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 949, 18 October 1957, Page 13

EXCAVATIONS

SEVEN CAVES, by Carleton S. Coon; Jonathan Cape, English price 28/-. MR COON is a man who combines a forceful pen with profound learning, for already to his credit are two of the most notable books available in their own fields: Caravan, the story of the Middle East, and The History of Man. Here he writes a fascinating account of his excavation of seven notable caves in the Middle East in search of the history of early man. Men today are as interesting to him as the men of a hundred thousand years ago, and so we meet the people who dig for him, who help or hinder his way, who exasperate him with their local prejudices, or delight him with their interest in the work they do for him. The excitement of digging for treasure is here, but the treasure is knowledge. Coon does not dress this up in the jargon of archaeology, which is rapidly reaching a stage when some purging of its vocabulary is necessary, but makes clear the importance of his finds in simple terms which are none the less exact. One of his most important finds had to be sent out of the Northern Hemisphere for radioactive carbon age determination because atomic bomb, exnlosions there were contaminating the air. He says that the sample was sent to the laboratory at Lower Hutt, Auckland. How the Waitemata grows! The author is most amusing when he is describing the difficulties he encountered in Persia, because of his name-Coon in Persian means rectum. Telephone operators went into uncontrollable fits of giggles, and serious officials invented cumbersome ways of addressing him. His workmen, however, found it a boon when they wanted to be rude to him. The human interest (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) of this very live book is in proportion

to its importance.

D. W.

McKenzie