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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 2, 1973)
Every calm, sunny day for the last two summers a small crew of divers and archeologists have spent all their working hours combing a section of the Gulf floor in search of the scattered remains of 400-year-old Spanish sailing ships. Under the sponsorship of the Texas Antiquities Committee, the personnel are recovering for the state of Texas vast amounts of archeological information that would otherwise remain buried in the ocean or be lost to treasure hunters and salvagers. Tons of material consisting of hundreds of individual artifacts have been recovered during ap proximately six cumulative months of work. Unfortunately, most of the perishable material — such as wood, cloth, and rope — is gone, and many of the fragile objects — such as clay pots — are broken. Mostly metal artifacts survive, although time and the sea have wrought strange changes in them, eating away at their surfaces or cementing them Bulletin Board TUESDAY Handball Club will meet on the De Ware basketball courts at 7 p.m. to set up handball ladders and round robin tournaments. Dues for students will be $3 and $5 for faculty. Mu Chi Chapter of Kappa Delta Pi will hold initiation of new members in Room 230 of the Memorial Student Center at 8:15 p.m. Dr. John J. Koldus, will be an honorary initiate and program speaker at the meeting. Inter-varsity Christian Fellow ship will meet in Room 226 of the Library at 7:30 p.m. for a Bible study. Agricultural Communications of Tomorrow will meet in Room 101, Earl Rudder Tower, at 7 p.m. Guest speaker will be Leroy Schaefer. Health and Physical Education Majors Club will meet in Room 601 of the Rudder Tower at 7:30 p.m. Horticulture Club will meet at 7:30 p.m. in Room 204 of the Plants Science Building. Air Force Student Wives Club will meet at 7:30 p.m. at 301 Ball St., Apt. No. 2110. For more in formation call Janice Kelly (846- 0332). Forestry Club will meet in Room 115 of the Forestry Build ing at 7:30 p.m. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers will meet at 7 p.m. in Room 103 of the Zachry Engineering Center. Final plans for the Oct. 17 field trip will be discussed and panel discussions presented. Saddle and Sirloin Club will hold the annual barbecue at 7 p.m. in the Commons of Krueger- Dunn. The tickets are free to all club members who have paid the dues. Engineering Technology So ciety will meet in Room 305 of the Fermier Building at 7:30 p.m. A presentation will be given by MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS NEW & SALES & COMPLETE USED RENTALS REPAIR 1410 Texas Ave. 822-2334 301 Patricia St. 846-2851 24 YEARS EXPERIENCE! Tune ups, brake jobs, valve jobs, motor replacement entire range of automotive needs for your car! State Inspection Station DISCOUNTS AVAILABLE ROBESON MOTOR 724 N. Main, 822-2622 We’ll Send Flowers Anywhere THE FLORAL CENTER “The Full Service Florist” " ’ 823-5792 PAWN LOANS Money Loaned On Anything Of Value. Quick Cash For Any Emergency. See Us For Ready Cash Today. Texas State Credit Pawn Shop 1014 Texas Ave., Bryan Weingarten Center AELEN Oldsmobile Cadillac SALES - SERVICE “Where satisfaction is standard equipment” 2401 Texas Ave. 823-8002 Bucyrus Erie Company, who are looking for construction machin ery sales people and those inter ested in engineering discipline. Wildlife Biology Association will meet at 7:30 p.m. in Room 113 of the Biological Sciences Building—East. Dr. W. B. Davis will speak on “About Bats.” WEDNESDAY Science Fiction Class of Free University will meet at 7:30 p.m. in Room 502 of the MSC Tower. National Association of Home Builders will meet in the Archi tecture Auditorium at 7:45 p.m. Pre-Vet Society will meet at 7:30 p.m. in Lecture Room 1 of Zachry Engineering Center. Bonfire First Aid Committee volunteers will meet in Room 305 of the Physics Building from 7:30 p.m. until 9 p.m. An exam will be given which will take 30 minutes. Senior Class will meet in Room 410 of the MSC Tower from 7:30 p.m. until 8 p.m. Pre-Vet Society will meet in Zachry Engineering Center Audi torium at 7:30 p.m. All interest ed in Vet-Medicine are invited to attend. together with grotesque encrusta tions of corrosion and shellfish deposits. A six-hour day on board the barge Discoverer, the Antiquities Committee’s vessel from which the crew of 10 to 20 works, re veals the tremendous difficulties encountered by land animals (men) attempting to work in a medium (water) which is not their natural habitat. The recovery of a single arti fact entails, first, an hour’s trip to the barge site, located some 1,600 feet offshore above the Port Mansfield Cut on Padre Is land. There the day’s crew re lieves the two divers who have spent the night on the barge as watchmen. Equipment brought from shore (including lunches of bologna sandwiches and apples) is laboriously transferred to the barge by means of a small in flatable boat, and diving gear is checked in preparation for the descent. In theory, the operation is sim plicity itself. a propeller-like blowing device on the barge is injected into the gray-ocean wa ters and its rotating blades clear a 30-foot diameter hole in the sand. “We are not in it for the coins. We’d be happy if we never found any,” says State Under water Archeologist Carl Clau sen, who put together the proj ect in 1972 and has supervised it both summers. His point is illustrated when one of the divers emerges from the water holding a pot sherd (portion of a clay jar). All work stops while the crew scrutinizes it. Clausen scrapes off a speck of what appears to be tar and burns it on the tip of his knife. “Smell,” he directs. The odor is pungent. “Probably pine pitch,” he muses. “So it looks like the Span ish may have been sealing their jars with pine pitch at least 400 years ago.” This is the sort of scientific information the operations are being conducted to discover. When the sherd has been seen by everyone, it is photographed from several angles, tagged as to location when found, and placed in a plastic bucket for safekeep ing until it is transferred ashore. Toward the end of the diving season the artifacts are loaded into vats of treated water and placed in trucks for transport to the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory in Austin. There they are cleaned and their de terioration stabilized in order that they may be subjected to further intensive study. When this process has been completed, the Antiquities Com mittee will arrange for their pub lic display at a museum or educa tional institution in order that they may be seen by the people of Texas — for whom they were recovered in the first place. Bridge Tourney Set Friday A duplicate bridge tournament will be held Thursday at 7:15 by the Unitarian Fellowship at 1202 Bristol. Proceeds from the tour nament will be donated to a charity. Anyone interested is invited to play in the handicap system. Do nations of $1.25 per player are requested. After the tournament a party will be held in honor of Dr. Ba- lusu Rao, who has recently be come an American citizen, and Dr. and Mrs. Nick Pace, who are being honored as life masters, the highest official rating of the American C o nt r a c t Bridge League. Houston Trip For Engineers Planned Soon Roland Love, chairman of the local chapter of The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engi neers, (IEEE), has announced that final plans for the chapter’s sponsored trip to Houston are almost complete. The field trip will be held on October 17, and will include a tour of the EXXON Refinery with lunch and a viewing of the Instrument Society of America’s (ISA) exhibits at the Astrohall that afternoon. Other activities include another IEEE sponsored field trip to Houston on November 20. That trip will include a tour of Hous ton Lighting and Power and NASA’s Avionics Lab. Down-home (Continued from page 1) help make a success: giving in terviews, posing for pictures, be ing patient with everyone. He probably would have walked on nails if it helped his career. On the road to making it he is very careful to do anything he can to promote himself. He is not yet at the point where he can afford to ignore things and people. He seems to be a man who is climb ing a ladder patiently, step by step, hoping for the road to star dom. He and his whole group seemed rather lost. They were eager to talk. When speaking to each other they sounded run down, as if they were out of things to say. They have been to 15 cities in 30 days, playing to lots of audiences and finding new friends. Grey said he loved road concerts, but his manager com mented earlier that they hated them, however, tours are neces sary. I would imagine that Holi day Inns can be lonely. Page 4 THE BATTALION College Station, Texas Tuesday, October 2, It takes a Man to meet a Challenge. FLY NAVY See the Officer Information Team in the new MSC or in the Zachry Engineering Building, through October 5, from 9 a. m. - 5 p. m. U.S. NAVY RECRUITING STATION SUNNYLAND SHOPPING CENTER 1702 TEXAS AVE. — PH. 822-5221 P. O. BOX 769 BRYAN, TEXAS 77801 Call Toll Free 800-841-8000 13.01 Hwu. 30—&4C,-85(p|