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

The surface of the oasis plain was taken as datum, and the position of the
floor of the pits above or below this datum was determined daily. Such
objects as vessels, fireplaces, and skeleton-burials were photographed in
situ, and all fragments of pottery and bones of animals that had served the
ancient inhabitants as food were, in each pit, placed in baskets which bore
tags marked with the date and the name of the pit. Thus the height above
the base of the mound and position in the horizontal plane of every object
found was recorded. Much of the earth was sifted to save small objects.
All small objects were produced for record-entry each evening. These
were simple articles, chiefly beads, whorls, small implements of flint, orna-
ments and implements of copper, generally wholly altered to carbonate
or oxide; to these were added toward the end small, rough, terra-cotta
figurines of woman and of cow or ox.
These simple objects had little beauty; the interest they aroused lay
in the fact that we were unearthing cultures of a remote past and in an
untouched field, far distant from the sites of classical civilization. We
realized, therefore, that since the whole mound consisted of the slowly
upward-growing débris of town life every object had played its part in the
daily life of vanished peoples; that considered collectively, in connection
with their observed positions in the column of débris (culture-strata), they
formed a continuous record—precious documents of a long-continued pre-
history.
The importance of considering even apparently insignificant objects
as documents containing a story, and of recording their vertical and horizon-
tal position in the column of culture-strata, became evident at every stage
of the analysis of our results. It was, for instance, this procedure that
enabled Professor Duerst to trace the transition of the Bos namadicus, pig,
and sheep from the wild to the tame state and to date, in terms of strati-
graphic growth of the mounds, the beginnings of domestications and the
establishment of successive breeds of these animals.
Again, it was the appreciation of the potential possibilities latent in
everything so recorded that caused Dr. Duerst to send to Professor Schellen-
berg a small porous fragment of burnt clay that was accidentally present in
a bag of bones. In this apparently worthless clod that botanist found the
evidence that the people of the oldest Anau settlement were cultivators of
wheat and two-rowed barley; and my consequent search in our carefully
labeled potsherds showed the casts and siliceous skeletons of the chaff of
these cereals in pottery from the base of the mound. From this Dr. Duerst
and I were able to draw independently the inference that the agricultural
stage preceded domestication and the nomadic shepherd stage of civili-
zation.