"A Harvard University ball in the wilds of Panama at which the natives became too hilarious was one of the sidelights of our expedition," the CRIMSON was told yesterday by Samuel K. Lothrop '15, Peabody Museum archeologist, whose discoveries of valuable material in Central American graves were recently announced.
Lothrop and H. B. Roberts, a former Harvard graduate student, sent out invitations for the ball from their primitive camp in Cocle province and extracted promises that there would be no fights.
"We were prepared for our guests with 200 gallons of corn beer and other spirits which we expected would last until midnight, when we hoped they would move on to another supply that we had placed several miles down the river. Hearing the sound of the drums, people flocked in from miles around. There was much dancing, and merriment which reached its height when one of the local officials fell into the river. As we had calculated, the guests left the Harvard ball about midnight. But our ruse failed, for in a few hours they returned with our decoy brew and remained with us until seven o'clock in the morning. The promise about fights was not strictly kept."
Lothrop and Roberts made clear that such episodes however were rare during the three years in which the expedition spent in digging up the lost culture of an extinct race.
"I think it is fair to say," Roberts said, "that the material we removed from the graves showed an artistic ability to create designs, carve bone, and work metal that reached the peak of the achievement of primitive American peoples. These people were living at the time of the Spanish invasions and were probably killed when the Spaniards murdered nearly 2,000,000 Panamanians in their search for gold."
"Press reports have greatly exaggerated the secrecy of our expedition and the value of the gold discovered," Dr. Lothrop said. "Actually, the many gold ornaments were beaten very thin and would not be valuable if melted.
"We unearthed more than sixty graves in which this tribe had buried their leaders. So generous were they with their offerings to the dead that it took us three years to remove the material from one trench 80 feet long, and I doubt if any similar area has produced such a wealth of archeological specimens.
"Only the nobility were buried in this fashion. It is as if we were to bury a prosperous business man with his wife, his servants, the family jewels and silverware, and then toss in a liberal quantity of groceries for use in the after-world. But instead of coffins, these people buried their dead in great stone slabs.
"All the material that we have collected will form a new part of the Peabody Museum, containing more individual pieces than any other exhibit. At present, we are busy repairing the valuable pottery, a job in which we are being aided by several very able Boston debutantes."
