#1. Ancient Mystery - Jeannine Davis-kimball investigate the secret of
central
Asia's mummy people
Ed Frauenheim
This article was originally published at The East Bay Monthly, VOL. XXIX,
NO. 3, December 1998 Issue
The archaeology is slow, dirthy work. It proceeds a grain of dust at at a
time and typically involves a spoon and a brush, not the bullwhip and six-
shooter Indiana Jones used to pre treasures from the tomb.
Once in a while, however, there truly is a dash of Hollywood-style
adventure, as Berkeley archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball discovered
during the summer of 1997. On a research expedition to western China,
Davis-Kimball and two colleagues found themselves wrapped up in a remarkable
ancient mystery spiked with modernday political intrigue.
They were investigating the mummies of the Takla Makan Desert, corpses so
well preserved under the arid sands that the trace of a tear still can be
seen streaking the face of a child buried 4,000 years ago. The condition of
the mummies, excavated at various sites since the early 1900s, surprised the
scientists who first found them. But far more startling was the realization
that these bodies, buried millennia ago in western China, are Caucasian.
They have blond, brown and red hair, prominent noses and deep- set eyes.
Some are nearly six feet tall. Buried along with them were textiles woven in
plaid patterns strikingly similar to those of ancient European fabrics.
Tests on one mummy linked it to a European genetic group.
This caused a clamor in scientific circles. Conventional wisdom has long
been that Western people didn't arrive in China until the establishment of
the Silk Road, about 2,000 years ago. Chinese scholars have claimed, and
Western scholars have agreed, that Chinese culture evolved in isolation,
apart from the influence of Europe. The Caucasian mummies of the Takla Makan
proved otherwise, indicating that Europeans forged eastward thousands of
years before anyone thought and built a thriving agricultural society in
what's now China's Xinjiang Province.
Davis-Kimball and her team, with support from the PBS program "Nova," went
to Xinjiang to find out just who the mummy people were, and what became of
them. But they soon discovered that not everyone wants that information made
known. Proof that Caucasians were living in the region 4,000 years ago
clearly refutes China's claim of historical sovereignty there -- and, more
important, challenges its hold on the oil-rich province of Xinjiang.
"There's oil down there," Davis-Kimball says. "That's the reason it has to
be part of China."
The people native to this area of central Asia are a Turkic ethnic group
called Uighurs (WE-gurs). They trace their ties to the region back to around
800 A.D., when their Turkic ancestors moved there and, anthropologists
believe, mixed with a people known as the Tocharians. The Tocharians, who
were Buddhists, are thought to have built and ruled a string of cities along
the central Asian stretch of the Silk Road. Study of Tocharian manuscripts
has revealed that they used a language closely related to Celtic and
Germanic tongues; their paintings reveal them to have been a fair-haired,
blue-eyed people. These distinctive characteristics have caused many
scholars to link them with the mummy people, who predated them.
Here's where the story gets political. The Uighur majority in Xinjiang now
chafes under Chinese rule. There were Uighur uprisings in 1990 and '97,
which were summarily crushed by the Chinese Army. To strengthen its hand in
the region, the Chinese government has flooded Xinjiang with some 6 million
ethnic Han Chinese. Though the region contains one-third of China's oil
reserves, 95 percent of the Uighur population lives in poverty. The Uighurs
protest that China has polluted their homeland with industrial toxics and
radiation (this is where China couducts its nuclear tests). China has
responded harshly to the dissent. Amnesty International reports that "a
pattern of human rights violations has emerged in Xinjiang since 1989."
China supports it claim to Xinjiang with a myth promulgated since Mao took
control of the region in the '40s: that China developed in isolation and
that this area has always been part of China -- even though the name
Xinjiang means "new territory."
Uighurs have seized upon the mummy pople as proof that their homeland is
historically distinct from China. When Davis-Kimball went to Xinjiang she
stepped into what is lterally a battle over the area's history, with a
mummies at the center.
"They were Caucasoid," David-Kimball says. "This is a no-no for Beijing."
Such a "no-no" that the government has long been loath to allow foreign
researchers into the region. Though the mummies were discovered at the
beginning of this century, it has been hard to get access to them for the
past few decades. More than 30 camera crews had applied to document the
story of the mummies and were rejeted before the Chinese government gave the
go-ahead to a joint project of "Nova" and England's Channel 4.
Throughout their stay, the team of Davis-Kimball, China historian Victor
Mair and forensic anthropologist Charlotte Roberts were closely monitored by
Chinese officials. The officials even went so far as to plan an elaborate
hoax to mislead them, Davis-Kimball says.
On a grave dig supervised by government chaperones, the team was led to an
obviously disturbed tomb that comtained a mummy that had been neatly
decapitated. Davis-Kimball and the others concluded that the government had
cut the mummy's head off to prevent the team from capturing a Caucasian face
on film.
"They had taken the head off so that we would not photograph the Indo-
European head, "Davis-Kimball says.
The team had seen the same mummy, intact, along with several others in the
back room of a small local museum a short time before the sham excavation.
Inn the Nova program -- entitled "Mysterious Mummies of China" -- Mair says
he noticed fungal growth on the corpse that indicated the body had been
recently moved. (The office of the Chineses Consulate did not respond to
requests for a response to these charges.)
The team also had trouble getting into some of the regional museums, where
many of the hundreds of mummies that have been unearthed are stored. Often,
Chinese officials would give them permission to visit, only to change their
minds soon after. "We were on this yo-yo all the time," Davis-Kimball says.
"We never knew what was going to happen next."
So Davis-Kimball and colleagues resorted to a little Indiana Jones-style
subterfuge of their own. With the help of a sympathetic local scholar, they
snuck into one key museum at midnight, avoiding the scrutiny of wary Chinese
officials.
"I kept thinking, how terrible that we had to stay up all night just to
photograph something that scientists should be able to study," she says.
Davis-Kimall has made her mark in the field of archaeology with a bold,
no-nonsense approach. A silver-haired woman who's comfortable in jeans and a
sweatshirt (but would rather not discuss her age), she entered the scholarly
world late in life, after raising six children and working as a nurse and a
convalescent-hospital administrator. She supervised the renovation work on a
Berkeley apartment building that she owns with her husband, Warren Matthew,
and the two manage several properties in the city.
A combination of business savvy and intellectual curiosity led her to found
her own research institute after earning a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's Near
Eastern Studies department a decade ago. The university declined to work
closely with some Kazakhstan researchers she'd contacted - Davis-Kimball had
been just the second Western scholar to receive a welcome in the then-Soviet
state - so she started the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads in her
north Berkeley home. The center, in turn, laid the groudwork for her first
major breakthrough, when Russian scholars invited her to excavate burial
mounds in Pokrovka, on the Russia-Kazakhstan border.
There she unearthed the bodies of women buried with swords, daggers,
arrowheads and other tools of war. Further research led her to conclude that
these women had ridden horses and fought in battle between 600 B.C. and 400
B.C., and that their tribe, the Sauromatians, may have been one of the many
real-life nomad groups who inspired the Amazon legend. News of
Davis-Kimball's discovery traveled quickly. The New York Times, NBC and a
host of magazines from around the globe featured her in stories.
Still, the attention hasn't translated into academic easy street. Davis-
Kimball's nonprofit center isn't part of UC Berkeley or any other
university, and relies on grants and pay-as-you-go archaeological digs in
central Asia. Students who sign up for the expeditions cover their own costs
- and sometimes Davis-Kimball's. She draws no salary from the center. She
and Matthew depend on rent from the apartments they own and some retirement
income.
Aside from her "Amazons" discovery, Davis-Kimball's work in the Central
Asian steppes has been less than glamorous - at least to those outside a
small scholarly community. The area she studies - what's now Kazakhstan,
Kyrgystan, southern Russia, western China and Mongolia - has been a black
hole on the map of most Westerners. Our attention is drawn to China, India,
Iran and Moscow.
That's now changing, as the former territories of the Soviet Union come into
their own and their natural resources become more important. But awareness
of the region is still dim, as evidenced by the widespread belief that China
evolved in isolation from other cultures.
Since the 1960s the concept of cultural diffusion has been downplayed as an
explanation for similarities shared by distantly separated societies. The
politically correct philosophy has been that far-flung societies must have
evolved independent of one another. Finds such as the Takla Makan mummies
are now forcing a reexamination of diffusionism. Archaeologists have
discovered evidence that whelled wagons were first brought to China from the
West thousands of years ago. Among the colorful woven clothing found in the
mummies' graves are hats identical to ancient hats found in Austria and
southern China.
The "Nova" program speculates that the mummy people originated in Eastern
Europe, near the Black Sea. This conclusion is based partly on some striking
petroglyphs found on a massive 500-foot-tall rock outcropping. The carvings
- which seem to show a fertility dance, a crucial concern for ancient people
with infant mortality rates of 33 percent or higher - are distinctive for
their triangular torsos and 90-degree arm positions. The only other place
where similar images have been found - by Davis-Kimball and other shcolars -
is in Moldova, a region between Romania and Ukraine, near the Black Sea.
Ancient artworks also helped strengthen the link between the mummy people
and the later Tocharians. At the top of a sheer cliff, deep in a complex of
caves filled with Tocharian script, Mair found ancient paintings of
fair-haired, blue-eyed people that closely resemble the mummies.
Altogether, the findings from the expedition indicate that what's now
western China was in fact occupied by non-ethnically Chinese people well
before theh Silk Road was established, and that those people later built
cities along the trade route - cities that fostered much of the important
cultural exchange between East and West.
"It really was a fulcrum," says British filmmaker Howard Reid, organizer of
the expedition. Everyone had sort of assumed it was the Chinese who built
these cities, or maybe the Indians. But it wasn't. It was the mummy people."
Davis-Kimball and her fellow scholars all came home from China concerned
about the Chinese government's restrictions on travel and study in the
region. Among their biggest worries is that the mummies and their artifacts
may be silenced permanently: the delicate bodies, fabrics and tools are
disintegrating quickly due to the poor conditions under which they're kept.
"They'll be lost," Davis-Kimball says. "And this is valuable historical
material for reconstructing the evolution of mankind - of peoplekind."
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#2. Re: uighur-l Uighur mummies say "no" to China
From: TudiH@aol.com
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 22:48:23 EDT
It is unfortunate that Uyghurs are not in position to claim their own history
today. Since the Chinese invasion of East Turkistan, Uyghur culture and
civilization have steadily regressed. The result of this destruction seems
to make it hard for people to link those ancient civilizations with a people
who even did not have a single Ph.D. until a decade ago among its 9 million
population.
The modern Uyghurs may not be as pleasant as those mummies to look at, but if
someone really wants to learn the true history of the region and people,
he/she does not need to go that far back. East Turkistan is one of the
regions where "time does not fly." Just as those mummies, the history is
very well preserved among the living.
I watched the NOVA film on the mummies. It showed Caucasian and Mongoloid
mummies buried side by side. Everybody seem to be very curious, and yet they
do not seem to notice that Caucasian and Mongoloid Uyghurs live side by side
today. In today's East Turkistan, there are plenty of fair skin, blue eye
and brown hair Uyghurs, they are also plenty of Mongoloid Uyghurs. Some of
these people may be mummified. I wonder if their mummified body buried side
by side will prompt the future scholars to search Europe for their origin if
they be found 2000 years later. If the current situation continues, they
might have enough reason to look far. But, today, scholars can save the trip.
The NOVA film showed that a piece of bread found in one of the mummy tombs is
exactly the same as the bread Uyghurs make today. Many people in Central
Asia, Mideast and Europe eat bread, but none of them makes that kind of bread
found in the tomb. Even the co-buried wood pan used in making dough for the
bread is same as the ones used today by Uyghurs in the surrounding areas.
There are many other links between those mummies and today's Uyghurs. It is
understandable that the Chinese wants to hide it, but it should not be
ignored by other scholars. Those mummies were definitely the ancestors of
modern Uyghurs. We inherited their looks, their tools, most importantly,
their land, so, we are the descendants of them, even though we inherited our
name from the ancient Uyghurs who were our partial ancestors as well. The
name "Uyghur" has not always been applied to the people in East Turkistan.
America has become a melting pot today because of its strong attraction as
the most advanced civilization. The ancient East Turkistan must have been a
melting pot for a long period of time in the past. As evidenced by those
artifacts found in the tombs, our ancestors settled down as agriculturalists
and artists more than 4000 thousand years ago, but most of our neighbors
lived in a nomadic society until the early 20th century, some are still
living as nomads. The gravity of Uyghur culture must have pulled some of our
neighbors into Uyghur society and gradually assimilated them. Even the
Genghis Khan was attracted to Uyghur culture and hired Uyghur councils in his
court and adopted Uyghur script for his Mongolian language which is still in
use today. Uyghur society is very tolerant to different people as long they
are not aggravated. I remember when I was little old people used to stop us
if we curse the Chinese. They used to say: "Do not say that, they are
Allah's children too". This tolerant attitude might have served as a tool in
assimilating different people into Uyghur society. Few people look a diverse
as Uyghurs today.
While nobody knows for sure where those Caucasian mummy people came from, it
is certain where they went: nowhere. They lived on in Uyghurs.
Even though the Chinese government claims that "Xinjiang has been a part of
China since ancient times," they are not so stupid to actually believe it.
They know as we do that we have nothing in common with them. We have
different looks, different language, different food, different religion,
different art, different music (while Uyghur music has all the 7 tones,
traditional Chinese music has only 5 tones), different musical instrument
(Uyghurs have much more intruments than the Chinese), different dancing
(Chinese do not have folk dance, Uyghurs do), different agricultural tools
and method (Uyghurs use Ketmen as the main farming tool, Chinese use
Tishang), different cities, different history, different culture, different
land and different temper. If we had been with China since ancient times,
where this differences came from? If East Turkistan had been an inseparable
part of China since ancient times, where or which city in East Turkistan the
Chinese lived before they renamed the land "Xinjiang--the new territory"?
Why they call it "new territory"? Assume they were assimilated into Uyghurs
as the others, then why did not they left any trace of Chinese culture?
The truth is East Turkistan belongs to China no more than Vienna belongs to
Mongolia (Genghis Khan conquered Vienna for a short period). China and East
Turkistan is separated by a huge stretch of formidable dessert and mountain.
Until railroad was built, travel between two countries was not possible for o
rdinary citizens, therefore, it was limited to government emissaries and army
incursions. As you can imagine, Chinese lived in China, Uyghurs lived in
East Turkistan.
No matter how strong the propaganda machine of the Chinese government is,
they cannot make truth disappear. They might be able to cheat the gullible
outsiders for a while, but, they cannot cheat real scholars. Truth will
prevail at the end.
Turdi
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http://www.eurasianet.org/resource/cenasia/hypermail/200010/0016.html