PREFACE. XXVII 
observe at several points—have been of great use in working up the results 
of our expeditions of 1903 and 1904. 
My personal attention was, in 1903, directed more especially to the 
observations connected with the character and distribution of sites of for- 
mer occupation, and their present environment and archeological promise. 
These sites abound to such an extent that one might call Southern Turkes- 
tan, with the valleys of the Tedjend, Murg-ab, Oxus, Zerafshan, and Fergana, 
a cemetery whose graves are the wasted and half-buried mounds of vanished 
cities. 
The results of 1903 made me most anxious to probe these mounds with 
the spade, and a grant was generously made for this purpose by the Trustees 
of the Carnegie Institution. 
Realizing that our problem was both geological and archeological and 
that pottery would probably be our most characteristic as well as most 
enduring fossil document, I sought an archeologist who should be expert 
in the subject of prehistoric pottery as well as in systematic excavation. 
And the success of the expedition of 1904 is largely due to the fundamental 
and systematic work of Dr. Hubert Schmidt of the Royal Museum fiir 
Volkerkunde at Berlin. Trained under Dorpfeld in excavations at Troy, 
and experienced in the whole field of European and Mediterranean arche- 
ology, he had studied critically the finds from the successive cultures of Troy 
and edited the museum catalogue of the Schliemann Collection, of which 
he had the charge. The government allowed him to join the expedition on 
the condition that the museum should receive duplicates of such finds as 
might be granted by Russia. 
The right to excavate in Turkestan having been given by the Russian 
government—the first concession granted to a foreigner—the expedition 
rendezvoused at Tiflis in February, 1904, and proceeded to Askhabad, and 
encamped on the neighboring oasis of Anau. Here were a recently ruined 
city and two great mounds, one of which I had selected the previous year as 
a promising point for exploration because pottery of seemingly great age 
was exposed in a trench made twenty years previously in search for treasure. 
The personnel of the party, besides my wife and myself, consisted of 
Dr. Schmidt, archeologist; Mr. Ellsworth Huntington, assistant and inter- 
preter; Mr. Langdon Warner and Miss Hildegard Brooks, assistants to Dr. 
Schmidt; and Mr. R. W. Pumpelly, physiographer and surveyor. The 
work began at four o’clock in the morning and, except an hour for breakfast 
and two for rest in the mid-day heat, continued till six p. m. 
The method of excavations, adopted by Dr. Schmidt first at the north- 
ern mound (kurgan) and later at the southern one, consisted in sinking large 
pits, maintaining a level bottom, which was deepened about two feet daily. 
