by Mark Wheeler

When archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert returned from a 1988 dig in the Kara Kum Desert in Turkmenistan, he thought he had it made. He was, he believed, the first American archaeologist to dig in the Soviet-controlled country, and he was convinced that what he had found there would rewrite history.

Hiebert, then a graduate student at Harvard, was interested in the origins of the Silk Road, the legendary trade route that connected China with countries to the west. Digging alongside his Russian colleagues at a now dried-up desert oasis in the Murghab River delta, Hiebert expected to find artifacts from the 2,000-year-old classical era. Instead, the group found a much older civilization that they thought to be unknown to the West. Dating back 4,000 years, it was comparable in age to the great civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, India, and China.

“I was starry eyed, thinking we’d found this great, 4,000-year-old civilization!” says Hiebert, an archaeologist with the National Geographic Society and formerly a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Then he found out from his doctoral adviser at Harvard that he wasn’t the first American to excavate a site in Turkmenistan after all, nor was his party the first to note the existence of a previously unacknowledged civilization. That honor went to, of all things, a geologist, who beat him to Turkmenistan by some 84 years.

The man was Raphael Pumpelly, the first professor of mining at Harvard University (1866–75), the head of the New England section of the U.S. Geological Survey from 1884 to 1889, and a man who brought a geologist’s eye and the now-standard scientific method—hypotheses, followed by fact collecting and testing—to the study of prehistoric sites in Asia. A collection of Pumpelly papers is housed at The Huntington.

“Raphael Pumpelly was part of an intellectual community that was pushing science forward in the 19th century, following Darwin and the theory of evolution,” says Dan Lewis, curator of the history of science and technology at The Huntington. And he had an advantage over scientists today, says Lewis. “It was a tight-knit group. He could write a letter to the very best people in a field and not only receive a reply, but develop a long-term correspondence with the best minds of his day.” These correspondents included such colleagues as Louis Janin, one of the country’s most active and important mining engineers; Bailey Willis, an old friend and colleague of Pumpelly who was renowned for his work on seismology during the early 20th century
(and whose papers are also held by The Huntington); and William Morris Davis, among others. Davis, often called the father of American geology, accompanied Pumpelly to Asia in 1903 and created the field of geomorphology, the study of the earth’s landforms.

The Pumpelly collection comprises letters, field notebooks, and diaries—more than 15 boxes of material—all donated to The Huntington in 1960 by Pumpelly’s grandson, Raphael Pumpelly III. These include the diaries of his wife, Eliza Shepard Pumpelly, who accompanied her husband to Asia in 1904. Fred Hiebert used Pumpelly’s field notes and Eliza’s diaries to deepen his own understanding of the day-to-day archaeological experience of that time. In 2003 he published A Central Asian Village at the Dawn of Civilization: Excavations at Anau, Turkmenistan. “I was able to use these notes, written by Pumpelly in 1904, as if they were modern field notes written by one of my graduate students working today,” he says.

“Notebooks from this fieldwork are chock-full of drawings, measurements, and Pumpelly’s characteristically tiny, crabbed penmanship,” says Lewis. Hiebert’s research at The Huntington continues to inform his fieldwork; in 2004 and 2005 Hiebert again traveled to Turkmenistan to attend a conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of Pumpelly’s excavations. Both the conference and the subsequent field season focused on learning more about the ancient culture in Turkmenistan that so fascinated Pumpelly. Scholars from around the world placed the ancient cultures of Turkmenistan in the context of other world civilizations. The recent excavations continue the tradition of sieving for seeds, bones, and shards of pottery. Anau, it turns out, was something of a trade post 4,000 years ago, a small, fortified settlement guarding an important pass that gave central Asians access to the goods and wealth of the civilizations to the south.

Born in 1837 in New York and educated in Germany, the six-foot, three-inch Pumpelly, who had a fondness for cigars and wore a long, flowing beard, was one of those larger-than-life figures who lived a life of adventure. He “dodged Apache arrows,” as his biographer Margaret Champlin described it, while in Arizona developing a silver mine; taught Japanese miners to use gunpowder to clear rock before he was kicked out of that country after being accused of being a spy; and traveled by camel and cart from China across Mongolia, Siberia, Russia, and on to central Asia. He crossed huge, dried inland seas, where he could see the ruins of cities on the ancient shorelines. It was during this trip that, by studying the geology of the area, he became one of the first individuals to investigate how environmental conditions could influence human settlement and culture.

Forty years after his first trip from China into central Asia, Pumpelly, now 65 in 1903 and at a time in life when many people begin to slow, reinvented himself as an archaeologist by applying for and receiving a grant from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. The institution, newly founded in 1902, had just announced its intent to fund scientific research. Pumpelly was an early applicant (heartily endorsed by prominent historian Brooks Adams); his goal was to return to central Asia to study the prehistoric archaeology he had seen years before and to study the geological and climatic factors that affected these early civilizations. Pumpelly speculated that a large inland sea in central Asia might have once supported a sizeable population. He knew from his travels and study that the climate in central Asia had become drier and drier since the time of the last ice age. As the sea began to shrink, could it have forced these people to move west, bringing along their skills, especially agriculture and an early proto-language, to the primitive Stone Age people of Europe?

This is a scenario that modern archaeologists still debate today, especially concerning the origin of language. In 1903 and again in 1904, Pumpelly traveled to what was then called Turkestan to conduct a geological survey and to excavate a site named Anau, near the border of Iran. His findings convinced him that an ancient civilization had indeed existed in central Asia.

At Anau, Pumpelly carefully excavated two 50-foot mounds—called kurgans—by digging a series of terraces and shafts. He carefully labeled the position of each found item, using methods that are now utilized by modern archaeologists. For example, he practiced fine-scale archaeology, using sieves to capture seeds and tiny bones, and employed specialists, such as botanists and anatomists, to analyze his finds. The pioneering methods, says Hiebert, would only develop incrementally in his field over the next 50 years or so. And in the absence of modern methods like radiocarbon dating, Pumpelly used his training as a geologist, keeping careful stratigraphic records to date sites. His findings would come close to matching data collected years later using modern technology and, as Hiebert puts it, “spending a lot of money.” Pumpelly’s early interest in how humans respond to environmental change, he notes, is still a keynote feature of archaeology. The kurgan digs unearthed pottery, objects of stone and metal, hearths and cooking utensils, even the remains of skeletons of children found near hearths. He discovered evidence of domesticated animals and cultivated wheat—sure signs of civilization.

But his work was stopped abruptly by, of all things, an infestation of grasshoppers. Eliza wrote in her diary in early May 1904: “The grasshoppers have invaded our camp. They come at noon almost as suddenly as a thunder shower but have not disappeared as quickly. Raphael went down in the well yesterday and he said they rained upon him in swarms and for a little while he had a horrid time fighting them…. These grasshoppers are not enchanting companions.” A week later she had had enough: “The grasshoppers are still here and the air still smells of them—we are hurrying to get off and hope to be gone by the end of the week.” Raphael and his excavation party were forced to abandon the site. Pumpelly was never to return.

Hiebert’s initial disappointment to learn that he wasn’t the first American to excavate in central Asia quickly turned to admiration for the man and his farsightedness. Hiebert now calls Pumpelly his hero, a “mythic figure” in archaeology.

“So why isn’t he heralded as the founder of modern archaeology instead of being relegated to a footnote in history?” Hiebert asks. “Most people in my field have never even heard of him. I’m bugged by that.”

The reasons, he says, are varied. One was a defense of conventional wisdom. In 1904 Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean were the accepted great centers of civilization. “So why in the world would Pumpelly have gone to Turkmenistan to look for civilization? To his peers, it made no sense; people couldn’t comprehend it.” Second, using sedimentation rates to date the site, Pumpelly originally estimated Anau to be about 10,000 years old. Some 12 years later, after other research in nearby areas had been published, Pumpelly reevaluated his data and revised his date, saying it was closer to 6,500 years old, dating to around 4500 B.C. But in the interim, Hiebert says, the extended date may have hurt Pumpelly’s credibility.

Then, notes Hiebert, by 1919–20 Turkmenistan had been absorbed into the Soviet empire, and scholars “just stopped thinking about it.” Soviet archaeologists did conduct work throughout the Kara Kum Desert, he says. Their method was to mount large-scale excavations (often of entire settlements), revealing the existence of numerous heavily fortified, large urban centers. That work, though, was only published in obscure Russian journals, mostly ignored by western archaeologists. And things stayed that way, says Hiebert, until Turkmenistan began to “defrost,” finally declaring its independence from Russia in 1991.

Beginning in 1993, following Turkmenistan’s independence from Russia, Hiebert returned to excavate, this time choosing to work at Anau. In 1996 he and his colleagues were digging in the same kurgan Pumpelly had dug in 1904. “We dug further down than Pumpelly had been able to do, and what we found was a confirmation of everything he believed.” There was early evidence of civilization in the form of farming—specifically, tiny grains of white wheat. Proof, says Hiebert, that the Turkmen people were engaged in agricultural production as early as 6,500 years ago. Hiebert’s wife, a zooarchaeologist (who joined the dig just as Eliza had 95 years earlier), discovered bones of domesticated animals. “So here we were, almost 100 years after Raphael Pumpelly had been here, confirming that he was right.”

In 2004, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Pumpelly’s 1904 Anau dig, Raphael’s great-granddaughter Lisa Pompelli (who uses the original spelling of her family’s Italian surname) accompanied Hiebert and his archaeological team to Turkmenistan to attend the international conference and celebrate the opening of that country’s museum devoted entirely to wheat and its early cultivation.

While it might seem odd to devote an entire museum to the celebration of wheat, Hiebert notes that the Turkmen have become very interested in their own history. “It’s a history that was repressed for some 70 years by the Soviets,” he says. “So they are just now, in the 21st century, exploring their own lost past and their heritage. And now they’ve discovered this western scientist.” So excited are they about Pumpelly, he says, that they’ve even republished all of Pumpelly’s original work. “Of course,” says Hiebert, with a smile, “none of us can read it because it’s written in Turkmen!” Despite the language barrier, the enthusiasm and excitement for Raphael Pumpelly is not lost on Hiebert.

Mark Wheeler is a freelance science writer whose work has appeared in Smithsonian and Discover magazines.