They are one of the great mysteries of modern China: ancient mummies found buried throughout the Takla Makan Desert in the 1970s and 1980s. Not only were the bodies amazingly   well-preserved, but more incredibly, many were clearly Caucasians

 Europeans who apparently lived in the heart of central Asia as far back  as 4,000 years ago. No one is quite sure why they were there or why their culture disappeared. Researchers think they simply may have followed herds from the steppes of Eastern Europe and settled in the  oases scattered throughout the huge desert. What they do know is that  the mummies, essentially freeze-dried in the arid desert air, are a  remarkable find that raises new questions about long-lost connections between East and West. Tour the mummy gallery to get up close with these puzzles of the past. 
http://www.discovery.com/stories/history/desertmummies/desertmummies.html

My geological explorations through Central and Northern China and Mongolia during 1863 had given me a great amount of material towards a skeleton geological map of the Chinese Empire.  I learned then that the successive dynasties had caused to be made exhaustive reports on the resources of the empire, covering not only those of the vegetable kingdom and the exact localities of all useful minerals, but including also fossil bones from caves in limestone, as well as certain fossil shells of well-defined species, both of which classes of objects belong in the Chinese Topographical phenomena of extraordinary interest were also recorded.

These printed "geographies" formed a great number of volumes.  Here was a great mass of information adapted to supplementing the material I had gathered on my journeys. 

To utilize it I employed for several months three able native scholars, courteously found for me by the foreign office, to extract all items of a long series of classes of entries.  The voluminous notes thus obtained were kindly translated for me by Mr. S. Wells Williams, then Secretary of our legation, aided by some of my missionary friends, and from them I was able to fill in my skeleton map and construct a "hypothetical geological map" of China, which Baron Von Richthofen, in publishing the results of his later and far more extensive explorations, was good enough to say was remarkably good in its broad outlines. 

Extracts were made also from other works, maps, including commented volumes of the writings of Confucius BC K'ung Fu tse

In studying all this material, I was naturally struck, as I had been on my journeys, by the great contrast between fertile China and arid Mongolia. Also, by the reaction of the latter upon the former as shown in the repeated attempts of vast Turanian hordes from the Mongolian tableland to overrun China. 

I was impressed, too, by a note on a Chinese map of the Tarim basin stating that here a large number of cities (between 100 and 200, I think) were buried by sand in the early centuries of our era.  Then, too, on native Chinese maps the desert of Gobi or Shamo was called Han-hai (dried sea), and was by native writers said to have been formerly an Inland Sea.
 

CENTRAL ASIA
1863

In studying the great map compiled by Klaproth, from caravan itineraries and other sources, I was puzzled by the great number of lakes dotted over the plains between the Aral Sea and the Siberian steppes -- bodies of water without outlets and with no inlets of appreciable size.  Their continued existence in an arid region seemed inexplicable.  And when later I crossed Mongolia, the poverty of the pasturage -- barely supporting the present very sparse population of Mongols, even on Tamtchin-tala, the very cradle of Genghis Khan and his hordes -- seemed evidence of a marked change in natural conditions since the times when these same plains poured forth the successive waves of humanity that first threatened China, and ultimately conquered that country and devaluated the Eurasian continent.

I passed the winter of 1864-65 in Irkutsk, where I learned from Russian officers, who had campaigned on the plains north of the Aral Sea, that the countless lakes still existed: But that they were continually and slowly shrinking in size.  Some of them on the Siberian borderland, which had been lakes in the eighteenth century, had actually dried up and were now the sites of towns.

It occurred to me that if the vision were reversed, one looking back through time would see the lakes gradually enlarging and coalescing until in some remote century they might appear as a large Inland Sea. Here seemed to me to exist a relation between the buried cities of the Tarim basin, the diminished pasturage and population of Mongolia, the vanished Han-hai (dried sea) of the Gobi, the shrinking of the lakes of the Aralo-Caspian undrained depressed area, and the overwhelming movements of barbarian hordes toward China and Europe.

The subject had the fascination of a mirage, in which dissolving glimpses of a vanishing world mirrored the parallel progress of nature and man toward desolation within and destruction without.  A great Inland Sea shrinking to disappearance presupposed former conditions favorable to its creation and to the maintenance, on its border, of a vegetation and population incompatible with the present aridity.  What might have been the origin of such a sea and how far back in the perspective of geological time, and what the cause of the apparently progressive change?

Agassiz's [Jean Louis Roudolphe, 1807-1873 U.S. naturalist born in Switzerland] beautiful theory of a polar ice cap in the glacial period had already been established. It seemed plausible that climatic influences that could produce such continental accumulations of ice might also have caused the Caspian and the Aral to coalesce and expand to form a large Inland Sea. With the passing away of the climate of the glacial period there would necessarily begin the shrinkage of the sea and the progressive desiccation of Central Asia.  And in this fateful progress should we see a resulting struggle for life lasting fifteen centuries, from the third century B.C., during which the peoples of an area as large as Europe, driven by nature from their home lands, drenched the soil of Asia and Europe with blood, gave dynasties to China, and overthrew the Greek and Roman Empires, recasting the whole racial and social complexion of the world.

The home of our Aryan ancestors was then -- in the sixties [1860s] -- thought by such authorities as Lassen and Max Muller to have been in High Asia.  Reading these speculations, I recalled the fact that on a native map in an old Chinese commentary of the historical book of Confucius, there was the legend at a point in the Tarim basin:  "Here dwell the Usun, a people with blue eyes and red hair."  And with this, the problem assumed an added fascination.

The reader who knows even the elements of the Aryan problem of fifty years ago 1850's] will understand how quickly it became a controlling factor in my dream.  To the idea that the progressive shrinkage of an inland sea indicated a progressive desiccation that forced destructive radial migrations was added the thought that migrations similarly forced might have brought to Europe the Aryan peoples, Aryan culture, and Aryan languages. 

In this form the dream remained for many years the background of a busy life until 1891, when, in discussing it with the Director of the Russian Geological Survey, Mr. Tschernyscheff, I learned that strata containing shells of the glacial period had actually been found in a position that seemed to really point to an inland sea of that period. Then my dream assumed the form of what seemed to me a legitimate hypothesis, worthy of being tested.  It had before this been too subjective in character.

Among the friends with whom I had talked on the subject in the early eighties, Messrs. Henry Adams and Alexander Agassiz had given me much encouragement.  So, after Mr. Carnegie had founded the Institution for Scientific Research that bears his honored name, I suggested to Mr. Agassiz, who was a trustee, that the Institution should send an expedition to Central Asia to reconnoiter.  This the Executive Committee agreed to do, on the condition that I should go myself.

It is one thing for a man of scientific training to live in the enjoyment of framing an attractive but only subjectively supported hypothesis, and it is a quite different thing to find himself, as I then found myself, face to face with the duty of
 testing it on the ground.  Fortunately for the enterprise, Professor W.M. Davis was sufficiently interest to volunteer, at my request, to take charge of the physical-geographical part of the reconnaissance.  I had little doubt that Mr. Davis would find evidence toward confirmation of the physical side of the hypothesis; but it was not without much anxiety that I faced the uncertainties of a search for traces of long-since vanished peoples and cultures, which, even if once existent, might well have been obliterated.

Up to this time I had done practically no reading in connection with the subject and was ignorant of the amount of thought and effort that during forty years had been devoted to Central Asia.  The Russian General Staff had covered an immense area with good topographic surveys, and the Imperial Geological Survey had already mapped the geology in considerable detail.  And I found that the so-called "Aryan problem" was no longer the simple hypothesis of the school of Max Muller and Lassen; it had become a hotbed of controversy in which, as a result of speculative activity, from the original linguistic seed had arisen a surprising variety of forms, into the analysis of which entered linguistic, anthropological, historical, and geographical considerations without number.

In St. Petersburg my plans were facilitated in the most generous manner by individual men of science, by the Imperial academy of Sciences and the Geological Survey, by the ministers of War and Agriculture, and by Prince Hilkof, Minister of Ways and Communications.  So thoroughly was this a planned and executed that throughout our travels and work in 1903 and 1904 the different members of the expeditions met uniformly with the most open hospitality and the most cordial assistance.
 

TURKESTAN [Turkmenistan]
1901-1905
@Footnote
Explorations in Turkestan, with an account of eastern Persia and Sistan.  Expedition of 1903 under the direction of Raphael Pumpelly.  Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication No. 26, 1905.
 

The reconnaissance expedition of 1903 consisted of Professor Davis, with Mr. Ellsworth Huntington as his assistant, my son Raphael Welles Pumpelly, and myself.  We remained together through Southern Turkestan, as far as Tashkent; separating there, Mr. Davis and Mr. Huntington, at first together and later separately, took in the regions of Issikul, and the Western Tian Shan Mountains from Kashgar to Lake Balkash, while my son and I examined the country from the Syr-darya to the heights of the Pamir.  During the following winter Mr. Huntington made observations in Sistan on the Persian-Afghan frontier and in northeastern Persia.  In the various reconnaissance's there was accumulated a great amount of information bearing directly on the objective points of the investigation and forming the subject matter of the volume published in 1905.

In their respective areas Messrs. Davis, Huntington, and R. Pumpelly established independently positive proofs of at least three distinct glacial and interglacial epochs of the glacial period and obtained abundant evidence of the deep-reaching reaction of these upon the topography of the mountains and plains.

We were also able to appreciate highly the work of the Russian geologists -- to mention only Tschernyscheff, Karpinski, Muschketof, Bogdanovitch, Andrusof, and Nikitin in the pre-quaternary geology of Turkestan.  Both this and the careful work of Andrusof and Sjogren on the east and west shores of the Caspian, and of Konshin in delineating phases of the expansions of the Aralo-Caspian -- the accuracy of which we were able to 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 Turkestan, with the valleys of the Tedjend, Murghab, 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 fur Volkerkunde at Berlin.  Trained under Dorpfeld 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 Ashkabad, and encamped on the neighboring oasis of Anau.  Here 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, physiographer and surveyor.  The work began at four o'clock in the morning and, except an hour for breakfast and two for rest in the midday 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.  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 and animals that served the ancient inhabitants as food were, in each pit, placed in baskets which bore tags marked with the name and date of each 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, ornaments 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 debris 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 debris (culture-strata), they formed a continuous record -- precious documents of a long-continued prehistory.

The importance of considering even apparently insignificant objects as documents containing a story, and or recording their vertical and horizontal 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 Namadicus, pig, and sheep from the wild to the tame state and to date, in terms of stratigraphic growth of the mounds, the beginnings of domestication's 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 Schellenberg a small porous fragment of burnt clay that was accidentally present in a bag of bones.  In this, apparently worthless clod that botanists 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 civilization. 

It seemed to me that an examination of the abundant animal bones seen in the trenched mound in 1903 might prove of value in several respects and possibly throw some light on European relations.  Consequently all that were found were collected, and each day's findings sacked and duly labeled as to stratigraphic position.  About half a ton of these were forwarded to Dr. Duerst of Zurich, to whom, as Dr. Schmidt informed me, the German museums submitted sub-fossil animal remains for study.  As a comparative anatomist, Dr. Duerst was especially interested in the domestic animals from the comparative side and from that of their origins.  The results of his exhaustive study of the bones from Anau, to which he devoted his whole time during nearly three years, and his far-reaching conclusions are given in the second volume of this publication.

While Dr. Schmidt was conducting the archaeological work, an independent physiographic investigation was carried on by R. W. Pumpelly and myself -- a search for local geological records of changes in the attitude of nature toward man. This had long been to me a coordinate part of the Central Asiatic problem.  The reader will see how important were the results obtained in this study of the operation of geological and climatic forces during the present epoch as recorded in mountain movements and in alternate aggradation and degradation of the delta-oasis.

Our workmen were the local Turkomans, a people speaking a Turkish dialect, very near to the Asmanli, but who had become racially much influenced by infusion of Persian blood through mothers captured in raids on to the Iranian plateau.
These Turkomans, before they were with difficulty conquered by Russia, were the terror of Central Asia.  Themselves Sunnite Mohammedans, they had (besides the feud between Iran and Turan, traditional from remote time) the fanatical hatred of the Shi-ite Persians.  In swift raids they exterminated Persian villages, saving only women to sell as slaves in Bokhara and Khiva.  Since their subjection they have been peaceable, and are esteemed by the Russians for their bravery and honesty, qualities that we, too, had every reason to admire in our workmen.  We paid them from 25 to 40 cents a day for labor that was always well and persistently performed.

Our work at Anau was stopped by inroads of a vast army of grasshoppers, which not only filled our pits faster than they could be removed, but were spread through the irrigation ditches over the surface of the oasis in thick masses.

From Anau, we moved to Merv, where we hoped to find sites of great antiquity and to make explorations preliminary to future excavation.  The wasted walls and citadel of Ghiaur Kala (City of the Infidel) seemed the most promising, but here, while we reached in our pits only down to culture strata of the third century A.D., our exploring shafts showed that the base of culture was probably not older than few centuries B.C.

There can be little doubt that among the great number of wasted mounds on the large Merv oasis some are exceedingly ancient, but intense heat and the prevalence of dysentery among the personnel and beginning mortality among the workmen put an end to excavating, and we removed to the more healthy altitude of Samarkand, where, after a hasty examination into the local archeological possibilities, I disbanded the expedition.  Mr. Huntington was left to make a rapid survey of the distribution of mounds on the Merv oasis, and Mr. R. W. Pumpelly started an expedition on his own account, for physiographic observation, through the mountains of Bokhara and over the Pamir to Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan, the results of which are incorporated in his chapters in the second volume. 

It was my intention to defer publication of the results of the expedition on 1904 until after the proposed for 1905.  But the condition of unrest in Russia during the winter of 1904-05 caused the Trustees of the Carnegie Institution to postpone the work, and the preparation of the reports was immediately begun, and continued till 1907.

While each one of the investigators was expected to work up his material, there devolved upon me, as initiator and director of the expeditions, the duty of presenting an independent discussion of the results as a whole.  I found myself confronted with the task of translating and editing the contributions of the experts, and of drawing my own conclusions from these and from my own observations.  To do this I surrounded myself with a library of six hundred or more volumes, covering many of the more important as well as latest writings in the sciences related to our work and problems, besides many borrowed from libraries.  Literally living in this problem, for nearly four years, my whole time, reading, and thought has been devoted to acquiring such a general survey of the field as would enable me to discuss the subject of our results and of their wider bearing in the light of the present condition of archeological and ethnological knowledge.

Besides incidental inspection of the museums of Tiflis and Tashkent, numerous visits for study were made to those of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich, Schafhausen, Cairo, Athens, London, Naples, and Rome, and to those of Paris, including M. De Morgan's systematically collected finds from Susiana -- to me perhaps the most important of all -- and in connection with my chapter on chronology a special journey was made, together with R. W. Pumpelly, to Egypt to study the rate of growth of Egyptian village mounds in comparison with those of Anau.

Of the two alternatives -- confining the reports, my own included, to a record of observations and finds -- or having each contributor go further and, treating his subject from the comparative point of view, draw his conclusions as to the bearing of his results on the general question of Eurasian problems -- the latter seemed preferable.  For, with the whole chain of observation and thought fresh in the mind, it would seem to be the province of the individual investigator to state his inferences, even if only as working hypotheses.

I confess to having written a chapter on the Aryan problem in the light of an extended study of the whole field and of our own results.  However, this I have suppressed because it seemed a premature as well as a hazardous venture for one not already an authority on the subject; and the word Aryan is mentioned only incidentally.  The various parts, however, of the volume contain abundant material for both use and controversy in this connection.  In drawing my own conclusions I have tried to keep before the reader a current statement of the objective facts from which such inferences were drawn.

The reader may be surprised that no traces of writing are noted among the finds from Anau, especially since it is assumed that the people who carried the proto-cuneiform script in Chaldea came from an eastward-lying region within the area of isolation.  It must be frankly confessed that such traces were not looked for.  But even had these earlier peoples of Anau I and II possessed the art of writing, it would probably have been used only on wood, bark, or skins; for the straight and curved lines of the earliest proto-cuneiform script of Chaldea are proof that in its pre-Chaldean stage it must have been used on 
materials different from the clay tablets on which it was possible to develop the later cuneiform.  And all traces of organic substances have disappeared, except only charcoal and niter-saturated bones.  And while we might perhaps expect the strata of Anau III, which show evidence of Chaldean relations, to contain inscribed clay tablets, these might easily be confused with the containing earth mass and thus escape eyes that were not looking for inscriptions.

And now what relation do the results bear to the dream that gave rise to the expeditions?  On the physical side, Messrs. Davis, Huntington, and R. W. Pumpelly have traced in High Asia the records of several great glacial expansions during the glacial period.  The climatic conditions, which during that period so greatly expanded these glaciers and buried Russia under thousands of feet of ice, presumably produced also the Inland Sea whose shore lines are still visible.

The evolution of civilization has been traced backward to a time when, before its datings in Babylon and Egypt, man at Anau already lived in cities, cultivated wheat and barley, began the domestication and breeding of the useful animals which are our inheritance, and possessed the fundamental industrial arts, including a certain amount of metallurgical knowledge.  Evidence has been traced of a progressive desiccation throughout long climatic cycles in whose favorable extremes civilizations flourished which disappeared in the arid extremes. 

And that the climatic conditions under which these civilizations vanished gave rise to very early migrations and to a constructive reaction upon the outside world would seem to follow from the early appearance, in Babylonia and Egypt and in the late stone age in Europe, of wheat and barley and of breeds of domestic animals which Dr. Duerst identifies with those first established on the TransCaspian oases.

I have in Chapter IV attempted to show that Central Asia was, from one of the epochs of the glacial period onward, isolated from Africa and Europe and that, excepting the elements of the lowest generalized from of human culture, all its cultural requirements were necessarily evolved and differentiated within the region of isolation.  Before the supposedly Central-Asian Sumerians fused with the Semites on the Euphrates they had been trained in a struggle with nature which had culminated in the ability to conceive and execute great undertakings, as shown in the work of controlling the great river.  Their field of thought was doubtless confined largely to economic effort and organization.  Into the fusion, the contemplative nomadic shepherd Semites brought a new range of speculative thought, and out of the union arose the highly developed Babylonian civilization.  And to the extent that this entered the origins of pre-classic Aegean and Mycenean cultures, so far did it carry the contribution of the fundaments of civilization from the Central-Asian oases to the Mediterranean.

The earlier reactions of the oasis cultures on the outside world were, therefore, both as regards migrations and ideas, essentially constructive in character.  The later and greater migrations were of a different character.  The growth of great nomadic populations, to whose outward movement these were due, could not have begun until after the development of the art of breeding the animals upon the possession of which alone life on the arid plains of Asia depended.  I have shown, in the chapter on migrations, that during climatic conditions which depopulated the oases the grasses of the arid plains would permit the expansion and differentiation of nomadic shepherd peoples till all Central Asia should be occupied, and that later there came a time when -- in the progressive desiccation though an arid extreme of a climatic cycle and some thousands of years after the beginning of domestication and breeding of animals -- the populations, swollen to the limit of the supporting capacity of the pasturage, would be forced to seek outlets into more favored regions.

The great continental unrest which variously affected different parts of the West, being caused by the decreasing capacity of the pasturage to support nomadic shepherd life, could not have begun until all of Central Asia had become peopled up to the limit of that capacity.

We may imagine the great area to have been by this time portioned out among peoples of varied racial origin and having different degrees of culture, varying from nomads in the arid regions to more or less settled pastoral peoples with elementary agriculture in the more favored lands north of the Black Sea.  The waves of movement, beginning in the drier eastern region, should seem to have progressed outward, the central peoples pushing the next outer ones outward, and so on till the climatically favored peripheral regions, including Europe, were successively submerged by one migration after another, ending with the purely Turanian inroads of our era. 

These migrations were destructive wherever they came in contact with cultures higher than their own.

The reader will see that in tracing back to Central Asia the source of the fundamental elements of western civilization, in finding the traces and cause of the inland sea, in discovering evidence of progressive desiccation (and in this the cause of the migrations that revolutionized the world), the dream has to this extent realized.

On the other hand, as regards the Aryan problem, we have contributed only some fragments that may be useful in further speculation.  The solution of the great problem awaits much more extended archeological, anthropological, and philological research.

Our indebtedness is indeed very great for aid and hospitality received on this expedition, as it was in that of 1903.  In England, our ambassador, the Honorable Joseph H. Choate, smoothed the way through Turkey with a letter from the Turkish ambassador.  Prince Hilkof again placed at our disposal for the season a commodious private car.  In St. Petersburg my plans were again generously furthered in many ways by Messrs. Tschernyscheff, Director, and Karpinski, Bogdanovitch, and Andrusof, members of the Imperial Geological Survey, while general Artamonof, of the general Staff, kindly aided me in getting War Office maps of Turkestan.  I am under deep obligation to Count A. Bobrinski and Mr. Latichef, of the Imperial Archeological Commission, and Professor W. Radlof, President of the Central Committee for Central-Asiatic excavation, for the obtaining from the Government permission to excavate. 

Mr. Salemann kindly examined the few Uigur and Pehlevi inscriptions found at Merv, and to Mr. Markof we owe the important determination of the coins found at Merv.

In Tiflis, the personnel of the expedition were delightfully entertained with dinners and a ball by the Georgian Prince and Princess Begtabegof.  In Turkestan at Kraznovodsk, we enjoyed again the hospitality of Colonel and Madame Volkovnikof.  At Ashkhabad General Ussakofski, governor of Transcaspia, and Madame Ussakofski entertained us socially.  And all the details connected with organizing and continuing our work at Anau were carefully managed by General Ussakofski and the district Natchalnik Colonel Kukol-Yaznopolski, while the required government supervision was courteously executed by Mr. A. Semenof.

At Bairam-ali (Merv) the Director of the Imperial Domain, Mr. Yeremief gave us a house for all the members of the expedition, and Madame Yeremief made our stay pleasant socially in their beautiful house.

Here, too, we were aided in many ways by Herr von Brandt, assistant to the Director.  At Bokhara we had, as on the previous expedition, reason to be grateful to Baron Tscherkesof for aid in visiting Old Bokhara and for aid in obtaining from the Ameer permission for R. W. Pumpelly to travel in the remote parts of the Khanate and in taking the steps that insured for him the hospitable reception extended to him throughout his journey.

We shall never forget the unbounded kindness shown us at Samarkand by General Medinski, the Governor, and Mademoiselle Collins, who took Mrs. Pumpelly and Miss Brooks and myself at once into the charming Government House and in every way made our stay delightful.  And after our departure General Medinski perfected the arrangements for my son's expedition.

To Professors Hoernes, of Vienna; Heierli, of Zurich; Pigorini and Colini, of Rome, I am indebted for kindly given aid in examining the collections in the great museums of those cities.  And in Paris I have to thank Mr. Hubert, of the Museum of St.-Germain-en-Laye, not only for guidance through the collections, but also for undertaking to have the metallic implements from Anau reproduced in wax, which was most artistically executed by M. Champion. 

To Professors Sayce and Flinders Petrie and Mr. Reissner I owe many thanks for instructive interviews in connection with Babylonian and Egyptian archeology.  And to the many hours spent with Professor Sergi during repeated visits to Rome and the deep interest taken by him in our work in Turkestan I own not only much encouragement and instruction, but also his important contribution to these volumes.

Dr. William James, Jr., very kindly volunteered his services in preparing from Mr. Langdon Warner's photographs and sketches of the skeletal remains the drawings that are reproduced in Mr. Warner's report.

No small part of the success of the expedition of 1904 is due to the volunteer work of Mr. Warner and of Miss Hildegard brooks.  Miss brooks, in addition to other duties, acted as assistant to Dr. Schmidt, recording the lists of finds and assorting the great mass of fragments of pottery that were collected daily.

Lastly, at Merv and Samarkand Mr. Homer Kidder rendered valuable volunteer assistance.

It should be mentioned that the topographic work was executed on a plane-table with telescopic alidade specially constructed by Messrs. Buff & Buff.

 To avoid misunderstanding it may be added here that the word culture is used as a synonym for civilization, and that the term culture-strata (Kulturschichte of the Germans) stands for the debris slowly accumulated during occupation of an inhabited site.

 It should also be added here that I presented the outlines of our results in my presidential address at the Ottawa meeting of the Geological Society of America in December, 1903; and that some changes from that address, in connection with the question of culture gaps and dating, are due to later and more extended analysis.

 It is desirable to refer here to a point that was overlooked on pages 55 and 56, in advancing a law of vertical growth of sites built of air-dried bricks.  It is this: Aside from the contribution of bones and potsherds, the accumulating debris is derived chiefly from the wasting surface of roofs and walls.  This is roughly proportionate to the area of these surfaces.  In primitive and small sites, the houses had, as a rule, only one story, but in larger cities of advanced culture, such as were Merv and Memphis, houses of two or more stories were frequent, and the rate of growth was correspondingly much more rapid.

R.P.
Dublin, N.H., October 1, 1908

PUMPELLY, RAPHAEL author, geologist, America's first graduate mining engineer 
Born in Owego, New York, September 8, 1837;
son of William and Mary H. (Welles) Pumpelly;
Educated at Owego academy and private schools.
Studied sciences and mining engineering, 1854-60, in Paris, France, and at Freiberg, Saxony.
LL.D., Princeton University, 1920.
Married Eliza Frances Shepard, October 20, 1869.

Made geological explorations in Corsica.
Had charge of mines in Arizona, 1860-61.

Made scientific explorations for Japanese Government, 1861-63.
Private geological expedition through Central, Western, and Northern China and Mongolia, 1863-64.

Explored Northern coal fields for Imperial Chinese Government, 1864.
Journey of exploration across the Gobi desert, returned to 
Europe through Siberia, 1864-65.

Professor of mining, Harvard, 1866-73.
State geologist, Michigan, 1869-71.

Director of Missouri Geological Survey, 1871-73.

Chief of the Division, U.S. Geological Survey, and in charge of mineral industries the Tenth Census, 1879-81.

Organized and directed the Northern Transcontinental Survey, 1881-84.

Made the explorations of discovery inaugurating the development of the iron-ore industry of most of the iron-ore ranges of Michigan and Western Ontario, 1867-1901.

Initiated and directed a physical-geographical and archaeological exploration of Central Asia, 1903-94, under auspices of Carnegie Institution of Washington. 

Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
President of the Geological Society of America, 1905.
Member S.R. Clubs: Authors, Century, University.
Author: 
Geological Researches in China, Mongolia and Japan, 1866. 
Journey Across America and Asia, 1870;
Geology of the Copper District of Michigan, 1873; 
Iron Ores and Coal Fields of Missouri, 1873; 
Bulletins and Maps of the Northern Transcontinental survey, 1882-82; 
Mineral Industries of the United States, Volume XV, 10th Census, 1886; 
Geology of the Green Mountains, 1894; 
Explorations in Turkestan, Expedition of 1903; 
Explorations in Turkestan, Prehistoric Civilizations of Anau, 1908; 
Reminiscences, 1918; 
Adventures of Raphael Pumpelly, 1920. 
Address:  Newport, Rhode Island, and Dublin, New Hampshire.