The Central Asian landscape is defined by two great sand and rock-strewn basins- the Karakum and Kyzilkum Deserts of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in the west, and the Taklamakan Desert of China in the east- separated by the mountains of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Rivers from surrounding highlands flow into these basins only to evaporate in summer, run low in drought years, or entirely disappear. Such streams once fed vast bodies of water in their landlocked interior, like the Aral Sea and China’s Lop Nur salt lake- but they are vast no longer. Climate change has seen to that.
Dotted around the edges of these desert basins are the signs of ancient settlements, frequently in the form of mounds raised above the surrounding plain as high as 80 feet, called tel in Arabic, tepe in Turkish, and depe in the Turkmen language. Such mounds are usually located near dried river deltas that form vestigial oases, often where rivers drop from higher elevations. This fact had long caught the eye of archaeologists.
One of these archaeologists was Raphael Pumpelly, a New York-born mining engineer by profession who prospected for ore in Arizona and surveyed the Gobi Desert during the American Civil War. Born into an elite Yankee family, his biographer called him a “gentleman geologist of the Gilded Age”. His foot long beard, rivaling those of many shaggy sheep fleece-hatted Turkmen he traveled among in the early years of the 20th Century, made him look more like Father Time.
The two mounds noticed by Pumpelly in 1903, which he called “time-wasted, wind-and-water carved remnants”, were in southern Turkmenistan- “a cemetery whose graves are the half buried mounds of vanished cities", as he wrote- just down the Kopet Dag Mountains that reach almost 3,000 meters and form the northern edge of the Iranian Plateau. The area was called TransCaspia in Pumpelly’s day and the mounds, one about fifty feet in height and the other ten feet shorter, were in the village of Anau, located a few kilometers east of the capital Ashgabat.
Anau is arguably the most important archeological site in all of Central Asia, for it was here that its own Bronze Age civilization first came to light. Well before the time Western archeologists bothered to look outside the classical study zones of the Nile Valley, the Mediterranean rim, and Mesopotamia, and while Russians were more interested in excavating the Scythian burial mounds of their own southern steppes, Raphael Pumpelly shined a light on a far and unlikely place, and found things that astounded the world.
In the years before World War II, after which archaeology developed a more scientific footing, the case of Anau as an exemplar of the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age- the so-called Neolithic Revolution- was cited in the same breath as the much more famous sites west to Egypt and east to China. To the layman, Egypt and China are still known as the cradles of civilization- but Anau has been all but forgotten.
The name of the Bronze Age culture that it represents has been given to another site just east of Anau, Namazga Depe, discovered later and not excavated until the 1960s. The reason this is so has to do not with the quality of Pumpelly’s work but rather with the vagaries of Western-Soviet relations.
On Pumpelly’s first trip to Asia in 1861 he had seen an old map showing that a race of blue eyed, red haired people had millennia ago lived near the Taklamakan Desert, then a grass land. This got Pumpelly thinking about how climate change in desert regions might affect human behavior, and he then developed what is known as the oasis theory of civilization. This eventually became a powerful explanatory tool and the case of Anau, where he returned to excavate in 1904- along with a German archaeologist trained at Troy, a zoologist, a botanist, and a geologist- became a common reference in the study of antiquity.
His work was cut short after only two months, however, by an invasion of locusts, which filled his dig pits - “a thick and rotting mass that poisoned the air far and wide,” as he wrote- faster than his men could clean them out. His attempt to return in the following year was blocked by the Russian Revolution of 1905, when unrest spread even to that distant province, and he never saw Anau again.
The oasis theory holds that as the climate dried, the inland seas shrank, and the grassland animals died off, Central Asia’s nomadic hunters were forced to settle where they could find water, in these delta-oases surrounding desert basins. There they adopted food crops, domestic animals, and the more complex patterns of life. This theory was just the first of many environmental explanations for the birth of civilization, and it offered an alternative to previous thinking that gave primacy to socio-political influences such as organized religion, population pressure, or power struggles.
This was later elaborated by Pumpelly’s team member Ellsworth Huntington in his book The Pulse of Asia, who wrote that “climatic changes have been one of the greatest factors determining the course of human progress”, and said that the “geographic basis of history”, along with “changeable facts” like cooling trends and drought, could determine both the progress of human civilization and the formation of a people’s national character.
In one wide and blunt theory, Huntington thus typecast all Asians as inferior to Europeans simply because of the weather. As an example, he recounted a conversation he had with a Persian, who said that his people were overly placid because of the country’s extreme heat and dry wind. When he pointed out that Herodotus had said nearly the opposite thing about their national character, the Persian answered, “Don’t you think that the climate has changed in 2,000 years?”
Russians on the other hand dismissed such ecological theories and preferred more ideological ones- such as class inequality and conflict, often leading to war and forced migration- as the drivers of cultural development. To examine this, their archaeologists focused on evidence such as rich vs. poor housing patterns and sumptuous vs. simple grave goods, all within the same settlement layer that might point to social and economic differences.
Thus the Soviets had the habit of excavating horizontally rather than vertically, focused on a settlement’s “space” rather than its “time”, with more of a wide-focus on buildings than a fine-focus on “seeds and beads.” That is why the Soviets excavated Bronze Age sites to their full extent, up to 100 acres in the cases of Namzga-Depe, while Western archaeologists elsewhere excavated more narrowly in pits, deep shafts, and terraces representing different time levels of habitation.
Pumpelly’s theory lost some of its explanatory power when later research into Central Asia’s climate history did not match his proposed dating for the shrinking of the inland seas and the emergence of village life. But his scientific field methods, borrowed from his training as a geologist in stratigraphy, by which he was able to define a relative chronology of cultural development based on the ceramics, metal objects, bones, and seeds found in the same sequential layers excavated at different sites outside Central Asia, remain valid even today. He was also a scrupulous maker of notes, measurements, and drawings.
In addition to the five hundred page report on his findings at Anau, published in 1908 as Explorations in Turkestan, whose subtitle Origins, Growth, and Influence of Environment underscored his focus on climate, Pumpelly made a comparative study of mound accretion in Nile villages during a later trip to Egypt, examined relevant museum objects in Tashkent and Tbilisi, and discussed the recent finds from Susa with his fellow geologist-turned-archaeologist Jacques de Morgan.
After that, Pumpelly the geologist seemed to fade from the annals of archeology- that is, until a graduate student named Fredrik Hiebert revived interest in his work eighty years later. Hiebert had worked on some Central Asian digs as a guest of Soviet sponsors in the 1980s, the first American to do so, but the authorities refused him permission even to visit Anau. A few years later after Turkmenistan’s independence, he was allowed finally to excavate there, and what he discovered in Pumpelly’s notes and published reports was a kind of Rosetta Stone capable of correlation with later Soviet research.
Since Pumpelly’s day, Central Asian archaeology seen from a Western perspective had essentially disappeared down a rabbit hole. The Russian Revolution and the tightening of Soviet control disallowed direct access to outsiders, research could only be found in obscure Russian language journals and unpublished reports that rarely reached the West, and Russian field methods did not mesh with those outside the Eastern Bloc.
The Soviets however dedicated many resources to the study of prehistory. Its main institutes in Moscow and Leningrad employed almost as many archaeologists as all those in American universities combined, and they sent permanent field teams to specific regions, such as the South Turkmenistan Archeological Expedition to the Kopet Dag foothills and plain. In the post-war years, these teams unearthed hundreds of Bronze Age settlements, including Gonur Depe near Merv where Hiebert first worked under the Greek-Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi, who defined what is called the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, an advanced Middle Bronze Age culture contiguous with the mountains of the upper Oxus River valleys farther east
Thus what Hiebert found in Pumpelly’s published report must have seemed like the bottom-most layer of one of these ancient settlements, sturdy enough intellectually to build upon again. The ability to excavate at Anau, he wrote, would be “an unprecedented opportunity to pierce the heart of a prehistoric village in Central Asia.”
But trying to find Pumpelly’s collected objects and samples, several tons of them and including one thousand pounds of animal bones, was not easy, for they had been dispersed across Russia, Europe and the United States. As Pumpelly wrote, “the interest these objects aroused was that they lay far distant from the sites of classical civilization”- and then he sent them to equally far distant museums to be forgotten.
His report’s laboratory analyses, however, had interesting results- proving the transition from wild to domesticated animals, shown in the lower bone densities typical of barn-raised animals, and the existence of barley and bread wheat grains in the Neolithic strata. This discovery of early wheat is commemorated in a newly opened museum there, clad in flamboyantly gleaming marble with gilded highlights and built in the shape of bundled sheaf with a single spike towering overhead, and the renaming of Anau’s district to Ak Bugday, or “white wheat” in the Turkmen language.
Pumpelly’s great grandchildren told Hiebert about a stash of expedition photographs at the Huntington Library in California, and gave him permission to dig in the foundations of their burned-out New Hampshire family home for other possible records once kept in strongboxes in the basement. He found nothing in the ashes, but in the possession of a former neighbor he turned up a trunk with the unpublished correspondence between his field team members.
When Hiebert finally returned to Anau with his own team, joined by Turkmen colleague Kakamurad Kurbansakhatov who had done his own excavations there in the 1970s, he was the first Westerner to do so since Pumpelly. Their joint report A Central Asian Village at the Dawn of Civilization (2003) synthesizes these two previously divergent strains in archaeology, the Soviet model and the Western model, and returned Pumpelly’s name to the history of archaeology.
In the years after Pumpelly left TransCaspia, Soviet excavation methods and theories about the Central Asian deserts, on the one hand, and those of Western archaeologists working on the Iranian plateau, on the other, became distinct. But Anau, situated on the Kopet Dag piedmont between the two, remained a place where synthesis was possible. This Hiebert called “the Kopet Dag way of life”- a cultural signature of small settlements frequently abandoned and rebuilt with fortified architecture, certain precious stones (carnelian, lapis, turquoise), and arsenic-rich copper alloys.
One thing that Pumpelly, Hiebert, and most of their Soviet colleagues did agree on was that Central Asia’s Bronze Age, although occurring later than in Egypt and Mesopotamia, was largely home-grown, or at least locally determined, and not a fully formed import from the outside. One could say with confidence that a unique Bronze Age civilization did exist there, separate and distinct from neighboring regions in the Indus Valley and Iranian Plateau, and even those more distant like the Mediterranean and China.
As Hiebert notes, “Central Asia had its own local precursors to civilization, and Anau’s mounds represent a microcosm of the development of Central Asia from the earliest settlement (5th millennia BCE) through the period of urbanization (3rd millennia BCE) and up to its transformation into a node on the medieval Silk Road.” Pumpelly’s words from ninety years earlier were less specific but more emphatic- “What we see in this view of a long buried and long forgotten people is a true picture of what has never been seen before- the actual transition of man from barbarism to civilization.”
In fact, there was more to Anau than buried mounds. Its nearby village has the remains of fine 15th Century Sayyid Jamal al-Din mosque, destroyed in the 1948 earthquake that also leveled Ashgabat and killed an estimated 176,000 people, after Pumpelly had described it as a complete gem. The 1st Century BCE Greek geographer Isidorus of Charax referred to Anau by the name Gathar in his Parthian Stations, a listing of the Silk Road’s towns and wayside inns between the Euphrates and Afghanistan.
Pumpelly had also been preceded at Anau in 1886 by the Russian general A.V. Komarov, something of an amateur archaeologist himself who had previously dug at Merv, Meshad, and the nearby Parthian capital of Nisa. When he saw Anau’s mounds, he thought they might be gold-laden burial mounds, or kurgans, like the Scythian sites on the steppes of his homeland. He also probably chose to dig there because it was located conveniently just steps from the newly built TransCaspian Railway. The cross-sectional trench opened by his untrained soldiers across one of them revealed deer bones and cave bear teeth, but no gold.
It is fitting then, one hundred years after Komarov came up empty and Pumpelly found his ceramics, bones and seeds, that a real treasure- not gold but a stamp seal made of a stone called black jet, or lignite, and of even greater value to an archaeologist- did turn up on Hiebert’s watch. What Central Asia’s Bronze Age had lacked until then was evidence of a writing system, but this seal’s markings resemble those of China’s western Han dynasty from the 1st Century that were found in the Taklamakan Desert.
This creates something of a dating mystery. The Anau seal, with reddish pigment staining its inscriptions, was found at a level corresponding to 2300 BCE, and indicates that, yes, its hour glass and trident shaped incisions are probably an early form of writing. Such seals were used by sophisticated cultures elsewhere for marking precious goods in palaces and temples, thus indicating an evolved level of elite society there too. But how to explain the two millennia gap between the Anau and the Han seals?
Did Anau’s writing system directly influence the Han dynasty? But if so, where are other seals from intervening periods that provide the link? Or instead, was there a disturbance in Anau’s intermediate time strata, so that its seal and those of the Han in fact date from the same period? Hiebert asks half jokingly if maybe a mouse moved his seal two thousand years into the past.
When first told of the discovery of the Anau seal, Hiebert’s senior colleague said to him, Great, now go find one hundred more like it- in order to confirm that it truly belongs where it was excavated. “Such is archaeology,” he says with a shrug, acknowledging its many uncertainties even when field work is by the book. But with this single seal, Anau still shows us that it has yet more to say about Central Asia’s past.