EXPEDITIONS - PANAMA, 1950 
National Geographic 
News Bulletin 
prepared and issued by the 
National Geographic Society 
Washington 6, D. C. 
For Immediate Release 
Washington, D. G. — Taking up the study of a 
strip of Atlantic coast where Columbus left off is the assignment to 
be tackled by a National Geographic Society-Smithsonian Institution 
expedition team early in the New Year. 
The site chosen is Panama west from the Canal Zone to the 
Costa Rican border, on the north side of the isthmus’s mountain divide. 
The primary purpose, Dr, Gilbert Grosvenor, president of the National 
Geographic Society said in announcing the project todajr, will be an 
archeological reconnaissance of this wild, lush, tropical Atlantic- 
drainage area. It is a region about which Columbus wrote at consider¬ 
able length following a visit there in 1502 . 
Leader of the group starting for this site from Newark 
Airport on January 2 is Matthew W. Stirling, Director of the 
Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. The four-month field trip 
will be Dr. Stirling’s eleventh survej' of pre-Columbian cultures in 
Middle America since 1933 under National Geographic-Smithsonian 
auspices. 
Rivers Are Only Highways 
With Dr. Stirling will be his wife, Marion, an accomplished 
archeologist in her own right, who has been his associate on most of 
* 
his trips; Robert Rands, a specialist in Middle American archeology, 
d 
and Richard H. Stewart, National Geographic staff photographer, a 
veteran of past Stirling expeditions. 
Plying westward from headquarters at Colon in local coastal 
craft, the scientists expect to make their penetrations of the 
forested jungle by mounting its rivers in native dugout canoes. Tne 
Rio Code del Norte, largest stream on the 200-mile coast, has 
tributaries that rise on the base of the Peninsula de Azuero, tne 
remote area covered by Dr. Stirling's Panama research in 19*+9« 
7977 (MORE) 12-22-50 
EXPEDITION WILL STUDY PANAMA COAST 
LAST EXPL ORED BY COLUMBUS IN 1502 
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