Prof. Fredrik Hiebert holding oldest ceramic pottery chard dated around 3,500 B.C. from the Anau, Turkmenistan (Russia) archaeological site. Another Turkmenistan chard near his hand is a 15th century A.D. blue and white copy of a traditional Chinese pattern. Center is a jagged cylindrical vase around 2,500 B.C. Next to it is another 2,500 B.C. well-preserved delicate vase. On the silk square is the carved "bone tube," circa 2,000 B.C.

NOW, ON THE TABLE WITH US, IT ALMOST LOOK AS IF I AM LOOKING AT DELFT CHINA. HOW DID THIS BLUE AND WHITE, DELICATE PATTERN COME TO BE IN CENTRAL ASIA ALONG WITH THESE OTHER PIECES? WHAT ARE WE LOOKING AT? HOW OLD IS IT AND WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?

On the table in front of us are a series of pottery shards. A pottery shard is a part of a pot that was broken. These pottery shards are the best thing we have in archaeology because when they are broken, people throw them away. These are the remains we find most commonly on the dig. So, I have a selection of ceramic shards which represent the time scale we have from Central Asia.

The first piece we have is the blue and white ceramic that has a bird or dragon on it and these curly designs that do remind us of Delft ceramics. This is a 15th Century A. D. Silk Road pot. It would have been locally made, but it would have been made in imitation of Chinese blue and white. And what's interesting about this is that in central Asia, they are making imitations of Chinese blue and white. And in Europe they were also making imitations of Chinese blue and white. It was sort of the Coca-Cola signature of the past.

Moving on chronilogically, we turn to another well-made pot. It's so thin (knocks on it), you can hear how finely made it is.

One-eighth inch thin walls of finely made vase from Turkmenistan, circa 2,500 B. C.

ONLY 1/8TH INCH THICK.

Yes, this is a piece that is about 2,500 years old, about 2,000 years earlier than the blue and white ceramic. Incredibly well made. It was obviously done by a master craftsman potter. this was made up in the desert oasis of Turkmenistan and it reflects a certain style that the people had. They didn't paint their pottery. You might think that had to do with the technology of the time, but in fact, it was their style not to paint their pottery. It's quite nice made. It's sort of buff on top and on the bottom it's red. They distinctly and purposefully did that. All of their ceramics from Central Asia is fine from this time period and it reflects the high level of crafts they had in the area.

Then we move on to three artifacts, not pottery, but metal and bone artifacts dated to about 2000 B. C., so these are about 4100 years old. We are moving back in large jumps of time. And here we see a bronze ax in the form of a bird's head with a feather going back and very clear eye.

Bronze ax in form of bird's head with eye and feather, circa 2,000 B. C.

And what we call a 'bone tube.' I wish we had a better name for it. They are always polished very finely with eyes, headdress or hair and some form of necklace or some perhaps a beard. And these ancient tubes we think were part of the ancient rituals of 2000 B. C. And the ritual live is another area we as archaeologists can look at. So we can look at the nature of their houses, the nature of their trade with these stamp seals we find, the nature of their production such as the pottery and even the types of religion they had such as the bone tube.

"Bone tube" carved with stylized head, circa 2,000 B. C.

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE BONE TUBE WAS USED FOR?

We're not exactly sure, but it was found in piles of dirt we have analyzed that had a tremendous amount of ephedra. Ephedra is a type of plant that ancient Zorastrians used to create a ritual drink that allowed them to hallucinate and get closer to God. It may well be that the tube was used in some pre- Zorastrial ritual involving ephedra. Ephedra has medicinal factors. The decongestant Sudafed is made from the same ephedra chemical. But if you take it in some quantity and mix it with a poppy or opium, it would have the effect of giving you visions or hallucinations.

IN THE AREA YOU ARE WORKING, IF YOU WERE GOING TO TIE THEM INTO BLOODLINES OF PEOPLE ALIVE TODAY, WHICH COUNTRY WOULD BE CLOSEST TO THIS GROUP?

That of course is one of the questions we would like to know, but don't have the means to answer right now. I think that if we used the old perspective in suggesting there were individual civilizations that developed by themselves without much interaction, we might say Turkish people in the area are the descendants.

DID YOU EVER FIND ANY SKELETONS DURING THIS WORK?

Burials were very formally made. They would build a mud brick structure, construct a little house and put ceramics such as some of these pots here. Sometimes they would leave a ritual last dinner in with the burials. These have taught us a great deal about the people. We haven't found as many burials as we have found along the Indus River or in Mesopotamia, but we've found enough to give us an interesting idea bout the funereal rituals and the afterlife that the central Asians thought.

IS IT POSSIBLE THERE ARE FEWER SKELETONS BECAUSE THEY MIGHT HAVE USED A FORM OF CREMATION AND BURNED THEM?

That certainly is possible. There is a ritual in ancient Persian Zorastrianism that we think would have an early form in the desert oases that would involve leaving the bodies out to return to nature.

SO IN A DESERT CLIMATE, THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN WIND BLASTED AND DISINTEGRATED?

Yes, so the burial record might not reflect the size of the population, exactly.

AND IT WOULD BE HARD THEN FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS TODAY TO KNOW FOR CERTAIN WHAT THAT POPULATION SIZE WAS IN CENTRAL ASIA?

Yes, there are some things we can guess at, but we are never going to be able to determine such as the exact size of the population.

WHAT HAS SURPRISED YOU THE MOST FROM THE EARLY 1980S TO NOW?

Well, I think the thing that surprised me most was actually not the archaeological remains themselves, but the reactions of our colleagues. As we began to peel back the lawyers and reveal civilization in the desert oases, some people wouldn't believe us. Some people did believe us. Some people have challenged the origins of this. Some people have simply ignored this. What we are really seeing is that now from the 1980s to the beginning of the 21st Century is finally an understanding that this area really takes its place in among the great civilizations of the old world.

SO, YOU ARE SAYING THAT YOUR OWN COLLEAGUE SCIENTISTS WERE NOT OPEN MINDED TO THIS DISCOVERY?

I don't know if they weren't open minded. They hadn't taken into consideration this new area of the world. And the more we work on it, the more we realize that this is an important part of the world. It was an important part of the world in the past and it was directly connected with the other areas. As we work more on this and create a better understanding of it in English and western languages, the more we are getting the idea out that we have a large Bronze Age civilization in central Asia.

COULD THERE HAVE BEEN IN THE CELTIC WORLD UP IN THE BRITISH ISLES BUILDING THE MEGALITHIC STONE CIRCLES THAT PRE-DATED ALL OF THIS?

This question of the connection between the Celtic world and the ancient Near East is one that's been suggested as much as 100 years ago. The erection of these large stone megalithic monuments has parallels in the Black Sea world where there are megalithic tombs made there in the Mediterranean. And perhaps even on the Eurasian steppes.

Nevertheless, to consider those monumental works part of a civilization wouldn't fall into the same category as the types of societies we're talking about in central Asia or Mesopotamia because the builders of the monoliths really didn't have - we don't have evidence of settled farming or urban life. No cities. None of the domestic animals and plants. It's a type of complexity that is very different from central Asia, the Indus Valley and central Asia or China.

So, I think to be open minded, we have to allow us to understand the deep complexity of building monolithic monuments, but realizing diversity is also something very important. In central Asia, people built cities as they did in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. But in the areas of Europe, farming took much longer to get there. The farming that finally entered into Europe after central Asia, thousands of years, and after the Indus Valley, represent a different type of culture.

WHERE DOES YOUR WORK GO FROM HERE? WHAT'S NEXT?

We're very excited about discovering the stamp seal at our site dated to 2,300 B. C. We're certainly going to go back and look for more evidence of literacy administration of trade from this time period. We hope to dig deeper to find out how this particular civilization and site goes in this area. We haven't reached the bottom yet. We're still digging down. We really look forward to going back for a couple more seasons at this particular site. Then we hope to expand our research into looking at the ancient trade routes in the area.

Origins of the Bronze Age Oasis Civilization in Central Asia By Fredrik T. Hiebert

May 3, 2001

BY FAYE FLAM
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

PHILADELPHIA -- A major early civilization -- rivaling in sophistication the ones that emerged in the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, the famed cradle of civilization -- apparently thrived in central Asia between 2200 BC and 1800 BC.

These people, who lived in desert oases in what is now Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, used irrigation to grow wheat and barley, forged distinctive metal axes, carved alabaster and marble into intricate sculptures, and painted pottery with elaborate designs, many with stylized versions of local animals, according to discoveries that have emerged during the past decade or so.

"Who would have thought that now, at the beginning of the third millennium AD, we'd be discovering a new ancient civilization," said Fred Hiebert, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. He has excavated in the region nearly every year since 1988, shortly before the Soviet Union fell.

Some researchers consider writing to be a criterion for any true civilization, and now Hiebert said he thinks he may have evidence for meeting that, too -- a tiny stamp seal carrying four letter-like symbols in an unidentified language. He has dated it to 2300 BC.

On May 12, Hiebert will present his findings at an international meeting on language and archaeology at Harvard University.

"The implication of the seal is incredible," he said, because there's no existing evidence that these people had a written language. And the characters engraved in the stone stamp are unlike any ever seen.

"It's not ancient Iranian, not ancient Mesopotamian. I even took it to my Chinese colleagues," he said. "It was not Chinese."

How could such an advanced culture have been so overlooked?

In the 1970s, Soviet archaeologists working in remote deserts west of Afghanistan came upon vast ruins, each one bigger than a football field. All were built with the same distinct fortress-like pattern -- a central building surrounded by a series of walls.

By the mid-'70s, the Soviet archaeologists had discovered several hundred of these structures in the areas known as Bactria and Margiana.

But their findings remained little known to the outside world because they had never been translated from Soviet journals.

"I was absolutely stunned," said Harvard archaeologist Carl Lambert-Karlovsky, who reads Russian and who, 20 years ago, first read some of the Soviet literature on this unknown world. He transferred his amazement to Hiebert, who was one of his graduate students.

No one knows the extent of this civilization, which may reach beyond Margiana, deep in the Kara Kum desert, and Bactria, which straddles the Uzbek-Afghan border.

Hiebert said he believes that a third area, Anau, outside Ashgabat near the Iranian border, is connected to this civilization, perhaps even the origin of the culture. It is about 2,000 years older, going back to 4500 BC, or the Copper Age.

A New Hampshire archaeologist, Raphael Pumpelly, had discovered ancient ruins at Anau in 1904, but the site did not receive much attention from the Russians. Only now, said Hiebert, are all the pieces, once divided by political boundaries, falling into place.

Planned, not haphazard

Over his years of study in the area where the civilization existed, Hiebert discovered that the various oases "looked like they were in the middle of nowhere, but they are part of the route everyone went on from west to east for thousands of years."

The oases, built in moist areas, created natural stepping stones on a trading route that reached from China through the Indus Valley to Mesopotamia -- all Bronze Age civilizations of the third millennium BC.

The fortress-like buildings of the civilization are larger than the biggest structures of ancient Mesopotamia or China, said Harvard's Lambert-Karlovsky. "The size at the base of some of the buildings is equivalent to the base of the pyramids," he said.

The Soviet archaeologists determined them to be temples because of their size and distinctive layout, but Hiebert, who spent time looking for bone shards, seeds and other remnants of living patterns, came to a different conclusion.

He said the buildings were more like housing complexes, with areas for ordinary people to live, others for the elite, storage areas, and what appear to be areas for ritual.

The dwellers were industrious in other ways as well. In Bactria and Margiana, there was no natural stone or metal. "It was nothing but sand," Hiebert said, and yet the ruins contained elaborate works in alabaster, marble and bronze. "The oasis people would import materials and manufacture them in their own art style."

Lambert-Karlovsky said that many of the artworks, utensils and jewelry were buried with the dead. In an unusual pattern for other early people, the women were buried with more valuables than the men.

Most of the artifacts Hiebert found remain in Turkmenistan -- the politically correct way to do archaeology today. But in his office on the fifth floor of Penn's University Museum, he displays a few.

There is a foot-tall alabaster column, a carved marble plate on a stand, an alabaster bowl, pieces of delicately painted pottery, and a bone pipe, possibly for drug use, carved into a little stylized human figure. Near the pipe, Hiebert found remains of the herb ephedra as well as poppy.

Small bronze axes carry designs, including one of a wild boar, and a piece of pottery is decorated with leopards. "Their world was full of dangers -- wild boars, snakes, scorpions," Hiebert said. These animals show up in their ritual art.

The animal patterns support an idea, suggested by the Soviet archaeologists, that the people practiced an early form of the religion known as Zoroastrianism, which originated in Persia. Animal worship was part of Zoroastrian ritual, as was the use of fire, suggested by some hearths, or altars, found in the remains of ancient buildings.

Hiebert is convinced that this oasis civilization originated around Anau. Not everyone agrees with him. At the forthcoming meeting in Boston, he expects a French team to present findings pointing to a migration from the north, rather than from Anau.

More laboratory work might reveal what the climate was like during the Bronze Age -- probably much wetter and more conducive to farming than it is now.

Hiebert plans to go back in June, armed with satellite maps he obtained with the help of NASA. These reveal wet oasis areas -- where other lost cities are likely to be found.

Central Asia yields ancient civilization

FAYE FLAM, KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

05/03/2001
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
REGION
A-5

(Copyright 2001)
A major early civilization -- rivaling in sophistication the ones that emerged in the Indus Valley or Mesopotamia, the famed Cradle of Civilization -- apparently thrived in central Asia between 2200 B.C. and 1800 B.C.

These people, who lived in desert oases in what is now Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, used irrigation to grow wheat and barley, forged distinctive metal axes, carved alabaster and marble into intricate sculptures, and painted pottery with elaborate designs, many with stylized versions of local animals, according to discoveries that have emerged over the past decade or so.

"Who would have thought that now, at the beginning of the third millennium A.D., we'd be discovering a new ancient civilization?" said Fred Hiebert, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. Hiebert has excavated in the region nearly every year since 1988, shortly before the Soviet Union fell.

Some researchers consider writing a criterion for any true civilization, and now Hiebert thinks he may have evidence for that, too -- a tiny stamp seal carrying four letter-like symbols in an unidentified language. He has dated it to 2300 B.C.

On May 12, Hiebert will present his findings at an international meeting on language and archaeology at Harvard University.

"The implication of the seal is incredible," he said, because there's no existing evidence that these people had a written language. And the characters engraved in the stone stamp are unlike any ever seen.

"It's not ancient Iranian, not ancient Mesopotamian. I even took it to my Chinese colleagues," he said. "It was not Chinese."

How could such an advanced culture have been so overlooked?

In the 1970s, Soviet archaeologists working in remote deserts west of Afghanistan came upon vast ruins, each one bigger than a football field. All were built with the same distinct fortress-like pattern -- a central building surrounded by a series of walls. By the mid-' 70s, the Soviet archaeologists had discovered several hundred of these structures in the areas known as Bactria and Margiana.

But their findings remained little known to the outside world because they had been published in Soviet journals, and never translated.

No one knows the extent of this civilization, which may reach beyond Margiana, deep in the Kara Kum desert, and Bactria, which straddles the Uzbek-Afghan border. Hiebert believes that a third area, Anau, near the Iranian border, is connected to this civilization, perhaps even the origin of the culture. It is about 2,000 years older, going back to 4500 B.C., or the Copper Age.

About 4,000 years ago, a civilization flourished in Bactria, an ancient kingdom in what is now part of Afghanistan. Archaeological evidence suggests the people who inhabited this ancient river valley formed a thriving Bronze Age empire, believed to have been the center of the Zoroastrian religion.

Archaeologists working at the Bactria site found several major architectural structures believed to have been part of the ancient Bactrian empire. Each structure was built from dried bricks of a uniform size. One structure was built in circular form about 40 meters in diameter, similar to the diagram shown below. Nine compartments were spaced equidistant around the circumference of the structure and believed to be the bases of towers.



Archaeologists must make reasonable guesses about structures and artifacts found at archaeological sites. Victor Sarianidi, the Russian archaeologist excavating the site, believes the building was a temple. Others argue that it was a palace. Some archaeologists believe the circular building was used as a fort. When under siege, the Bactrian population could seek refuge behind its fortified walls. Still other archaeologists believe this building was a marketplace or bazaar and had no military function.

Now it's your turn to interpret the finds and make your own reasonable guesses. Imagine you are an archaeologist examining this architectural structure. You and your team have found artifacts in the walls of the circular building. Study the list of artifacts. For each artifact listed, determine its function and what it suggests about the building. Was it used as a fort, a market, a temple, a palace or something else? After you've identified the artifacts and their functions, defend your overall conclusion about the role of this ancient building.

Note: The building floor plan shown above is based on an architectural complex in another site at Bactria. This is an exercise in critical thinking. As in archaeology, there are no right or wrong answers. For example, a spearhead could be found in a marketplace or a fort. The activity is meant to be open-ended, but you must explain your answers to support your reasoning (e.g., the spear was found among human or animal remains).