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Silk Road riches no embarrassment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

N. James
N. James*
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK
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Extract

The survival of organicmaterials in the waterless fringes of the Takla Makan and Lop Deserts in the Tarim basin in Xinjiang (north-western China) has fascinated us for a century, since Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein and Albert von Le Coq found the remains of settlements and cemeteries at the Great Wall's lonely outposts and along the routes between China and Central Asia known as the Silk Road. The finds date from the Bronze Age to the later firstmillennium AD. In the 1980s and '90s, it was shown that the most striking of them, the Tarim 'mummies', belong to both Mongoloid and Caucasoid peoples (Mallory&Mair 2000). The archaeology here of public and domestic life is full of the kinds of surprises and contradictions that we are learning to expect—if not accept—with 'globalisation'. Development in the region is now prompting new discoveries but also looters, so the research is urgent.

Type
Debate
Information
Antiquity , Volume 85 , Issue 328 , June 2011 , pp. 654 - 656
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 2011

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