National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

• PREVt\0g.   -)0(

observe at several points—have been of great use in working up the results

of our expeditions of 1903 and 1904.   -

My personal attention was, in 1903, directed more especially to the observations connected with the character and distribution of sites of former occupation, and their present environment and archeological promise. These sites abound to such an extent that one might call Southern Turkes= tari, with the valleys of the Tedjend, Mùrg-ab, Oxus, Zerafshan, and Fergana, a cemetery whose graves are the wasted and half-buried• mounds of vanished cities.

The results of 1903 made me most anxious to probe these mounds with the spade, and a grant was generously made for this purpose by the Trustees

of the Carnegie Institution.   •
Realizing that our problem was both geological and archeological and

that pottery would probably be our most characteristic as well as most enduring fossil document, I sought an archeologist who should be expert in the subject of prehistoric pottery as well as in systematic excavation. And the success of the expedition of 1904 is largely due to the fundamental and systematic work of Dr. Hubert Schmidt of the Royal Museum für Völkerkunde at Berlin. Trained under Dörpfeld in excavations at Troy, and experienced in the whole field of European and Mediterranean archeology, he had studied critically the finds from the successive cultures of Troy and edited the museum catalogue of the Schliemann Collection, of which he had the charge. The government allowed him to join the expedition on the condition that the museum should receive duplicates of such finds as might be granted by Russia.

The right to excavate in Turkestan having been given by the Russian

government—the first concession granted to a foreigner—the expedition rendezvoused at Tiflis in February, 1904, and proceeded to Askhabad, and encamped on the neighboring oasis of Anau. Hère were a recently ruined city and two great mounds, one of which I had selected the previous year as a promising point for exploration because pottery of seemingly great age was exposed in a trench made twenty years previously in search for treasure.

The personnel of the party, besides my wife and myself, consisted of

Dr. Schmidt, archeologist; Mr. Ellsworth Huntington, assistant and interpreter; Mr. Langdon Warner and Miss Hildegard Brooks, assistants to Dr. Schmidt; And Mr. R. W. Pumpelly, physiógrapher and surveyor. The work began at four o'clock in the morning and, except an hour for breakfast and two for rest in the mid-day heat, continued till six p. m.

The method of excavations, adopted by Dr. Schmidt first at the northern mound (kurgan) and later at the southern one, consisted in sinking large pits, maintaining a level bottom, which was deepened about two feet daily.