Two feet a day: Pumpelly's 1904 dig at Anau and the oasis theory
TL;DR — In 1904 Raphael Pumpelly dug the two mounds at Anau in two-foot levels, found wheat and barley chaff, and argued that a drying climate pushed oasis peoples outward.
Raphael Pumpelly, an American geologist, reached Tiflis in February 1904 with “the first concession granted to a foreigner” from the Russian government: the right to excavate in Turkestan. The expedition went on to Askhabad, in what is now Turkmenistan, and camped on the oasis of Anau. Hubert Schmidt of the Royal Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin ran the digging by a method that, in the 1908 report of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, “consisted in sinking large pits, maintaining a level bottom, which was deepened about two feet daily.” From those pits Pumpelly drew dates that put the oldest settlement in the ninth millennium BC, an argument that farming came before herding, and a theory that a drying climate had forced oasis peoples outward. A Penn Museum team that returned in the 1990s found his sections accurate and, in 2000, found a carved seal there.
Quick facts
- When
- February 1904 (expedition meets at Tiflis) · 1904 season at Anau · 1908 (Carnegie Institution report) · 1993 (Fredrik Hiebert visits Anau) · June 2000 (seal found) · October 10, 2000 (seal announced)
- Where
- The oasis of Anau near Askhabad, 300 miles east of the Caspian, in what is now Turkmenistan; the North and South Kurgans, half a mile apart
- Who
- Raphael Pumpelly; Hubert Schmidt; Ellsworth Huntington; Langdon Warner; Hildegard Brooks; R. W. Pumpelly; Duerst and Schellenberg in Zurich; Fredrik Hiebert; C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky
- Outcome
- Pumpelly's 1908 report dated the oldest Anau settlement to the ninth millennium BC and set out the oasis theory; later chronology puts Anau IA in the first half of the fifth millennium BC. Hiebert's Penn Museum team found his sections accurate and, in 2000, a jet seal with an inscription unlike any known script
Forty and fifty feet above the plain
The report placed the site 300 miles east of the Caspian. Near the middle of the oasis “two hills with rounded contours rise, one 40, the other 50 feet above the plain; they stand one north of the other and half a mile apart.” A mile to the east stood the ruins of the walled city. The northern mound already had a trench in it, dug “in search for treasure” by General Komarov, spelled “Komorof” in the report, “20 years or more ago”; Pumpelly had picked that mound in 1903 because old pottery lay exposed in the cut. Fredrik Hiebert, in 2001, placed Anau among the foothill cities of the Kopet Dag.
The party, besides Pumpelly and his wife, was Schmidt; Ellsworth Huntington as assistant and interpreter; Langdon Warner and Hildegard Brooks as Schmidt’s assistants; and R. W. Pumpelly as physiographer and surveyor. The Russian government let Schmidt take part on condition that the Berlin museum received duplicates of the finds. The workmen were local Turkomans, paid “from 25 to 40 cents a day for labor that was always well and persistently performed.” The season ended when “a vast army of grasshoppers” filled the pits back in.
Wheat chaff in a bag of bones
The plates in the 1908 report label four cultures: Culture I in the lower North Kurgan, with painted pottery; Culture II above it, with mud-brick houses and red and gray plain wares; and in the South Kurgan Culture III, with copper and bronze and wheel-made storage jars, and Culture IV, with iron, including a sickle.
The animal bones were bagged by layer, and about half a ton went to Duerst, a zoologist in Zurich. It was that procedure, Pumpelly wrote, “that enabled Professor Duerst to trace the transition of the Bos namadicus, pig, and sheep from the wild to the tame state.” Duerst sent the botanist Schellenberg “a small porous fragment of burnt clay that was accidentally present in a bag of bones,” and, in Pumpelly’s words, “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.” He and Duerst each concluded that at Anau farming came before herding.
1908, the appendix table, and the fifth millennium BC
The appendix table gives Pumpelly’s dates: “Beginning of domestication of animals...... About 8000 B. C.” and “Upper (copper) culture began on North Kurgan...... About 6000 B. C.” These were estimates made before radiocarbon dating existed.
Later chronology is far shorter. The Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on pre-Islamic Central Asian archaeology sets the Dzheitun (Jeytun) culture in south Turkmenistan at 6000 BC and states: “In the first half of the fifth millennium B.C. the Dzheitun Neolithic culture gives place to complexes of the Anau IA type with only an insignificant number of flint implements and varied metal articles.” On that reckoning Anau’s lowest layers begin several thousand years after Pumpelly’s figure.
"Progressive desiccation": the oasis theory in Pumpelly's preface
Pumpelly’s preface reports “a progressive desiccation throughout long climatic cycles in whose favorable extremes civilizations flourished which disappeared in the arid extremes,” and from this a mechanism: as an arid extreme approached, “the populations, swollen to the limit of the supporting capacity of the pasturage, would be forced to seek outlets into more favored regions.” That is the oasis theory. He went further, arguing that Central Asia had been cut off from Africa and Europe and that “Before the supposedly Central-Asian Sumerians fused with the Semites on the Euphrates they had been trained in a struggle with nature.” He called that a working hypothesis. No traces of writing were noted among the finds, and on that he wrote: “It must be frankly confessed that such traces were not looked for.”
The theory outlived its dates. Philip E. L. Smith, writing in Expedition in 1971, recorded that Roman Ghirshman’s reading of the earliest layers at Sialk in Iran as a settlement adapting “under conditions of increasing aridity” had “seemed to be supported by Pumpelly’s old evidence from the site of Anau.” In Hiebert’s 1999 account, Pumpelly’s claims for early farming and an early civilization at Anau “shocked his colleagues working in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and they rejected both the novel methods and his claims.”
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Fredrik Hiebert at Anau, 1993 to 2000
Hiebert, who had dug in the Turkmen S.S.R. as a Harvard graduate student in the late 1980s, received permission to visit Anau in 1993. He led a Peabody Museum excavation for two years with C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, and when the University of Pennsylvania hired him in 1996 it became a Penn project. In 1995 Pumpelly’s grandson, Raphael Pumpelly III, told him he remembered boxes of finds in the cellar of a New Hampshire summer house, burned 20 years earlier. In 1998 his team dug that cellar and found nothing. A neighbor then brought over a four-foot-long chest of photographs, drawings and an envelope marked “Sand from the Kara-Kum Desert.” Letters in it pointed to the Kunst Kamera in St. Petersburg as the home of most of the Anau finds, and Hiebert saw them there in February 1999. The new trenches sometimes hit Pumpelly’s backfilled cuts, and comparing the sections with the drawings of 1908, Hiebert wrote, “We could prove how careful and accurate Pumpelly’s excavations had been.”
In June 2000, at the eroded top of a large Bronze Age room dated to about 2300 BC, the team found a stamp seal of black jet about 1.3 by 1.4 centimeters. Hiebert wrote that the inscription “is unconnected with any of the writing systems in Mesopotamia, Iran, Harappa, or China. It most likely reflects a local symbolic system.” A 2007 article by Helen Wang and Wang Tao in the Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology bears the title “The Anau Seal and the Questions It Raises.” Hiebert announced the seal on October 10, 2000, at a conference presided over by President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan.
Key facts
- The Russian government’s permit to excavate in Turkestan was “the first concession granted to a foreigner”; Pumpelly’s party met at Tiflis in February 1904 (Pumpelly 1908, preface).
- Hubert Schmidt’s method was “sinking large pits, maintaining a level bottom, which was deepened about two feet daily,” with the oasis plain as datum (Pumpelly 1908).
- The North Kurgan rose 40 feet and the South Kurgan 50 feet above the plain, half a mile apart, with the walled city a mile to the east; the site lay 300 miles east of the Caspian (Pumpelly 1908, Chapter II).
- Local Turkoman workmen were paid 25 to 40 cents a day; the season ended when grasshoppers filled the pits (Pumpelly 1908, preface).
- A burnt clay fragment found by chance in a bag of bones gave Schellenberg the evidence of wheat and two-rowed barley; about half a ton of bones went to Duerst in Zurich (Pumpelly 1908, preface).
- Pumpelly’s appendix table dated the beginning of animal domestication “About 8000 B. C.”; the Encyclopaedia Iranica places the Anau IA complex in the first half of the fifth millennium BC, after the Dzheitun culture of 6000 BC.
- Hiebert received permission to visit Anau in 1993, led Peabody Museum seasons for two years with Lamberg-Karlovsky, and moved the project to Penn in 1996; a chest found in New Hampshire in 1998 led him to the Anau finds in the Kunst Kamera, St. Petersburg (Hiebert 1999).
- On October 10, 2000, Hiebert announced a jet seal about 1.3 by 1.4 centimeters from a Bronze Age room at Anau, with an inscription “unconnected with any of the writing systems in Mesopotamia, Iran, Harappa, or China” (Hiebert 2000).
FAQ
What was Pumpelly's oasis theory?
Pumpelly argued in his 1908 report that long climatic cycles of "progressive desiccation" let civilizations flourish in the wet extremes and destroyed them in the dry ones, and that populations at the dry extreme "would be forced to seek outlets into more favored regions." He extended it into a working hypothesis that the Sumerians had come from Central Asia.
How old is Anau?
Pumpelly's appendix table put the beginning of animal domestication at "About 8000 B. C." and the oldest settlement in the ninth millennium BC. The Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on pre-Islamic Central Asia sets the Dzheitun culture at 6000 BC and the Anau IA complex that replaced it in the first half of the fifth millennium BC.
What is the Anau seal?
A stamp seal about 1.3 by 1.4 centimeters, made of black jet with reddish brown pigment in its inscription, found in June 2000 in a Bronze Age room dated to about 2300 BC. Fredrik Hiebert wrote that its signs were unconnected with the scripts of Mesopotamia, Iran, Harappa or China and most likely reflected a local symbolic system.
Sources
- Raphael Pumpelly (ed.), Explorations in Turkestan, Expedition of 1904: Prehistoric Civilizations of Anau, Origins, Growth, and Influence of Environment, vol. I (Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication No. 73, 1908): Preface, Chapter II "The forming of the oasis of Anau," appendix chronology table and plate captions (full-text scan, Internet Archive).
- Fredrik T. Hiebert, "In Search of Anau's Past," Expedition Magazine 41, no. 2 (July 1999), Penn Museum.
- Fredrik T. Hiebert, "Unique Bronze Age Stamp Seal Found in Central Asia," Expedition Magazine 42, no. 3 (November 2000), Penn Museum.
- Fredrik T. Hiebert, "Eurasian Archaeology," Expedition Magazine 43, no. 1 (March 2001), Penn Museum.
- Encyclopaedia Iranica, "ARCHAEOLOGY v. Pre-Islamic Central Asia."
- Philip E. L. Smith, "Iran, 9000-4000 B.C.: The Neolithic," Expedition Magazine 13, no. 3-4 (1971), Penn Museum.
- Crossref metadata record for Helen Wang and Wang Tao, "The Anau Seal and the Questions It Raises," Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology 2 (2007), pp. 143–150, Brepols, DOI 10.1484/j.jiaaa.2.302555 (title and bibliographic data only).
Cite this article
- APA
- Our Earth's History. (2026, September 22). Two feet a day: Pumpelly's 1904 dig at Anau and the oasis theory. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/central-asia/prehistory/anau-turkmenistan-pumpelly-1904-oasis-theory/
- Chicago
- Our Earth's History. “Two feet a day: Pumpelly's 1904 dig at Anau and the oasis theory.” Our Earth's History, September 22, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/central-asia/prehistory/anau-turkmenistan-pumpelly-1904-oasis-theory/.
- MLA
- “Two feet a day: Pumpelly's 1904 dig at Anau and the oasis theory.” Our Earth's History, 22 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/central-asia/prehistory/anau-turkmenistan-pumpelly-1904-oasis-theory/.
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