ANCIENT SITES. 7 
EVIDENCES OF FORMER OCCUPATION. 
In our earliest historical records we find the countr}" occupied as now by 
dwellers in numerous cities, surrounded by deserts in which lived nomad peoples. 
The town dwellers seem to have been at least largeh- of Arjan stock and the 
nomads of Turanian. 
Who were the contemporaneous and the successive dwellers in the man\' 
towns? To what different races may they have belonged? Whence did they come 
into the land ? What were their civilizations and what their relations to other 
civilizations and to those of the modem world ? These are our questions, and they 
can be answered onl\- to a greater or less extent b\- a study of the results of exca\-a- 
tion and in the concentrated light of comparati\'e science in archeology, ethnology, 
and language and of survivals in arts and customs ; for the answers to some of 
these questions will be found rooted deep in the human strata of the ancient world. 
Asia abounds in the fragmentary survivals of stocks, arts, customs, and languages. 
The vestiges of fonner occupation by man are varied in character — in the 
eastern mountains are pictographic inscriptions recalling those of American abo- 
rigines, some rock sculpturing, and rough stone idols. At Lake Son Kul Profes.sor 
Davis describes stone circles, recalling .some of the dolmen-like forms, and at I.ssik 
Kul submerged buildings were reported in the lake. 
Along the river courses are abandoned canals which can no longer be supplied 
with water, and the Russian maps abound in indications of ruined towns, '' forts," 
etc. The most important remains are the tumuli and the towoi sites. 
TUMULI (OR KURGANS). 
The tumuli proper are accunuilations of earth, of rounded, generally synunet- 
rical fonn, often more or less elliptical in horizontal section. We met with them 
first along the base of the mountains east of the Caspian, but I saw none at a lower 
elevation than 250 feet above that sea. From this point ea.stward they abounded, 
with some interruptions, as far as to near Andizhan. (Tcnerally the}- were large — 
100 to 200 feet long and 30 to 50 feet high. They are nuich more abundant ea.st 
of the Oxus than to the w'est. At one point I counted fifteen in sight at once. 
Resides these larger tumuli, there are, especially along the Syr Dania in Fergana, 
localities with a great number of small mounds a few yards only in diameter, 
suggesting burial after battles. 
Mounds more or less resembling the larger ones are described by De Morgan 
at points in northern Persia, and they occur through southern Siberia and on the 
plains of southern Russia and of Hungary-. In all these countries they probably 
have different origins — different reasons for their existence. Those in Siberia and 
on the Black Sea have been extensively excavated. There has been some un.satis- 
factor\- excavation of those in Turkestan, mostly with unrecorded results. The 
kurgan at Anau, near Askhabad, which was trenched some years ago by General 
Komorof, afforded the best exposure of internal structure. It is nearly 200 feet 
long by 40 feet high and slightly elliptical in horizontal section. It consists of 
fine, horizontalh- stratified la\-ers of made earth. Layers of silt and broken col)bles 
