Bat Dung and Shish-Kebab
Seven Caves: An Archaeological Exploration in the Middle East. By Carleton S. Coon. (Cape, 28s.) PROFESSOR CARLETON COON'S career as a digger of caves began in May, 1939, at Tangier, and between then and now he has excavated seven caves—the High Cave at Tangier, the Beistun Cave in Kurdistan, the Belt Cave and Hotu Cave on the Iranian shores of the Caspian Sea, a cave in Afghanistan and two caves in the Syrian Desert. He gives us in this book an account of the travels and archeological prospections which led to these excavations, the results of the actual digs and an analysis of the scientific results which he achieved. He says his main object in digging in these seven caves was to find 'one complete or nearly complete honest-to-God skull of an Ice Age fossil man.' He did not succeed in this quest, but he found a great deal of other things : 'one hundred and fifty thousand pieces of flint and enough animal and bird bones, if re- assembled, to make a flock of sheep, a herd of cattle, a sty of pigs, a stable of horses, a flight of geese, a pride of lions and a small rookery of seals . . . also fifteen human beings.'
The importance of -Coon's work was not the quantity of things he found. He has established in areas where they were previously unknown the existence of Middle Palaeolithic flint in- dustries, Upper Palaeolithic blade industries and post-Pleistocene, Mesolithic and Neolithic in- dustries. At the Belt Cave and Hotu Cave in north Iran he found an early pre-pottery Neolithic cul- ture representing pastoralists with sheep and goats, underlying a pottery Neolithic culture of peasants who grew cenals and had cows and pigs as well as sheep and goats. These arc results of very great importance and should escape no one, perhaps taken in by Coon's claim that his book is 'an unscholarly narrative' or by its discursive and refreshing style.
Professor Coon takes us to his sites, shows us how he found them, tells us his troubles with government departments and with his labourers, and gives us the vicarious feeling that we have been travelling and digging with him, suffering his anguish and alarms, enjoying his discoveries and his triumphs; that we have, too, relaxed with him, drinking wine and eating sausages and sardines fried in olive oil at Les Grottes d'Hercule at Tangier and shish-kebabs at Hagop's in Aleppo. He writes, as always, with vigour and clarity and has an enviable knack of conjuring up to our senses as well as our minds the moments he is recalling. That moment, for example, when he first visited the Hotu Cave and sank 'ankle deep in a soft cushion of bat dung which threw off a rank smell . . . only smelled . . . once else- where in a kitchen in New Caledonia where flying foxes were hanging before being cooked. I could not get that smell out of my nostrils for several pages.
We arc told at the end of the book that Pro- fessor Coon's days of digging in caves in the Middle East seem to be over. What a pity, for such scholarly travellers and wise archaeologists as he is are rare. But whatever happens in the future, here we have, in this book, a fine record of travel and archaeology well done and well en- joyed.
GLYN DANIEL
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