The Last Place on Earth for Humans

March 30, 2010

While I was at the Bowers Museum in California this past weekend giving a talk on mummies, Peter Keller called me into his office to take a gander at something remarkable. Keller is the director of the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, and the man who succeeded in bringing the very famous Tarim Basin mummies and their associated artifacts to North America for the exhibition, Secrets of the Silk Road: The Mystery Mummies of China. These European looking mummies, some as old as 4000 years, have never travelled outside Asia.

Keller had just located the earliest known necropolis in the Tarim Basin, the site known in English as Small River Cemetery No. 5 and in Mandarin as Xiaohe, on Google Earth. And the two of us spent a good half hour or so examining the area with researcher Victor Mair. This made a great impression on me.

The Tarim Basin lies at the very heart of Asia, nearly encircled by steep snow-capped mountains. It is an exceptionally harsh, forbidding land. In summer, temperatures there can soar as high as 125 degrees Fahrenheit; in winter, they plummet to minus 40. And it is one of the most arid places on Earth, right up there with the Atacama Desert. For all these reasons, modern humans took their time settling the Tarim Basin. Indeed Victor Mair, the sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied these mummies for nearly twenty years, suggests that the Tarim Basin was the last place on Earth to be colonized by humans. And this didn’t happen until some 4000 years ago.

In the reign of Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese government put all this harshness to work. It constructed labor camps in the Tarim Basin, knowing that the desert would be a powerful deterrent to escape. And it built a nuclear testing range there, confident that no one would dream of crossing the barrens to spy.

It is one thing to know all this intellectually. It is quite another to see all the desolation of the Tarim Basin on Google Earth. Small River Cemetery No. 5, named for a stream that no longer exists, is surrounded by miles and miles of sand dunes, dried river and stream beds, and pure nothingness. If you’d like to see for yourself what I’m talking about, here are the coordinates: 40 degrees, 20 minutes, 11 seconds North and 88 degrees, 40 minutes and 20.3 seconds East. (And if anyone knows how I can embed the Google Earth photo of the site in this blog, please leave a comment below.) I can give you these coordinates without any fear of encouraging looting, as Chinese archaeologists have now completely excavated Small River Cemetery No. 5, and reconstructed the site, with its remarkable phallic looking wooden posts.

Surveying the area via Google Earth has given me a whole new appreciation for the Bronze -Age Europeans and Asians who colonized this region some 4000 years ago. Mair believes that water would have flowed then along many of the small streambeds that meander through the desert. I’m sure he’s right: how else could the colonists have survived there?

But life must have been a daily grind in the Tarim Basin, and I often wonder if the early migrants didn’t drift off to sleep each night dreaming of their greener and gentler homelands.

Fueling the New Chinese Mania For Antiques

February 5, 2010

I can’t believe how badly the New York Times missed the point this morning in its article on the newly red-hot antiquities trade in China. Journalist Dan Levin reports on the growing mania among middle class buyers in Beijing for Chinese antiquities, extolling their newfound passion for ” Ming Dynasty porcelain vases, 19th century hardwood furniture and even early 20th century calligraphy ink pots.” Such antiquities, Levin explains, “have become popular status symbols for an emerging middle class eager to display its new wealth and cultural knowledge.”

Too bad Levin didn’t ask a few hard questions about exactly where all these Chinese antiquities are coming from. If he had, he might have come away with a very different impression. While researching a new story for Archaeology magazine, I recently discussed with Victor Mair, a Sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and one of the world’s leading experts on the archaeology of Xinjiang province, this very issue.

I had noticed in Mair’s articles that many of the most important Bronze Age and Iron Age sites in Xinjiang–sites that have yielded European-looking mummies and western grave goods and that are now revolutionizing our understanding of Central Asian history–had been badly looted. In fact, looting in Xinjiang has become so serious that Chinese archaeologists are constantly forced to excavate entire cemeteries just to salvage and protect some of the finds.

I asked Mair what on earth was going on. The Xinjiang sites, after all, are in the midst of a huge and very barren desert–one of the bleakest and most remote places on earth. Mair explained to me that Chinese looters have become very sophisticated. They journey into the desert equipped with GPS and specifically target the ancient cemeteries there. The devastation is enormous, Mair explained, with mummified human body parts strewn everywhere. “They just take the bodies, the heads, the coffins and throw them out on the ground,” he said. “They are looking for gold or they are looking for something that is obviously a nice artwork.”

Most looters then sell their finds to middle men in Hong Kong, individuals who don’t ask any questions. “You can go down to the antiquities market street there,” said Mair, “and you can find unbelievable things, precious materials or precious objects from all over China being sold there. So Hong Kong is like a door for selling.”

To me, this is the real story behind the newfound enthusiasm for antiquities in China. And there is a terrible irony here. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong ordered the destruction of “old culture,” officially condoning the looting of old cemeteries and destroying antiquities. Now the pendulum has swung wildly in the other direction, as the Chinese middle class celebrates its ancient culture. But the change in attitude has only led to further destruction of the archaeological record.

The Burner of Books

January 26, 2010

The China Daily News carried a very cool story this week on a major new archaeological discovery in Hubei province. According to Shen Haining, the director of Hubei’s cultural heritage bureau, excavators working in a tomb that dates back to the Warring States period of China’s history (475-221 B.C. ) recovered a trove of water-saturated bamboo strips covered in inked Chinese characters. Resembling a snarl of soggy noodles, the strips are remains of ancient and exceedingly rare Chinese books–a find that is sure to generate huge interest in China and abroad.

Perhaps a little Chinese history is in order here to help make sense of this find. The Warring States period, as its name clearly suggests, was a time of massive violent military clashes. Lords of seven major states all vied for supreme power in tianxia (which means “all under heaven”), and they threw huge infantry armies bristling with mass-produced iron weapons at one another. These armies also boasted for the first time in Chinese history archers with crossbows and soldiers fighting on horseback, both of which completely transformed military engagements in the Far East, rendering them far more horrifying.

The period came to an end finally when one of the combatant lords, Qin Shi Huang, subjugated all his rivals. But while the new emperor brought peace to China, he committed a grave sin against history and literature. Fearing that all earlier books would cast doubt on the legitimacy of his rule, Qin Shi Huang ordered most Chinese books of the day to be burned and he had scholars who possessed such forbidden writings buried alive–making bamboo-strip books dating from the Warring States period rare indeed today.

You might ask yourself why we should care today about the fate of these lost Chinese documents, many of which were recorded on bamboo strips. Well, it turns out that amid all the bloodshed and chaos of the time, many of China’s greatest thinkers were discussing warfare and dreaming of peace. Many of their works were undoubtedly lost in the destruction ordered by Qin Shi Huang, though a few, including the very famous meditation The Art of War, survived to the present thanks to later copyists.

I am dying to find out what the soggy bamboo strips in the newly discovered Hubei tomb will hold. “It’s still to early to tell,” Shen told the China Daily reporter. “Let’s wait and see. Archaeology is all about surprise.” Hear, hear.