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Books: Tracking the Tarim Mummies
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Volume 54 Number 2, March/April 2001
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by David W. Anthony
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A solution to the puzzle of Indo-European origins?
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Archaeological and linguistic evidence places the Indo-European homeland in the North Pontic region. Members of one Indo-European group (the Yamnaya culture) that migrated to the western Altai Mountains, where they are identifiable as the Afanasievo culture, may have later moved into the Tarim Basin of what is now western China. (Map by Lynda D'Amico) [LARGER IMAGE] |
The Indo-European problem is one of archaeology's oldest, most contentious
questions. More than 200 years ago, in 1786, English jurist and scholar Sir
William Jones realized that Latin and Greek shared a common origin with
Sanskrit, the ancient language of Hindu law and religion. These three
languages, he proposed, had developed from a single ultimate parent
language, now called Proto-Indo-European. Linguists soon added most of the
languages of Europe (including English), Iran, and northern India-Pakistan
to the family, and eventually discovered several extinct cousins, including
Hittite, spoken in Anatolia about 2000-1000 B.C., and Tocharian, a group of
two (or possibly three) languages spoken about A.D. 500-800 in the Buddhist
monasteries and caravan cities of the Tarim Basin in what is now western
China. All of these languages still display telltale traces of the same
Proto-Indo-European grammar and vocabulary. But where and when was the
elusive mother tongue spoken? And by what historical circumstances did it
generate daughter tongues that became scattered from Scotland to China?
In 1995, media reports brought to the public's attention astonishingly
well-preserved remains of European-looking people, dressed in
European-looking clothes, buried in the Tarim Basin between about 1800 B.C.
and A.D. 500. This came about through the persistent efforts of Victor
Mair, a professor of Chinese and Indo-Iranian literature and religion at
the University of Pennsylvania. Long known to specialists but poorly
understood and little studied, the Tarim mummies (not really mummies, but
bodies preserved by dry conditions) quickly became the focus of intense
interest and debate. Riveting photographs appeared in ARCHAEOLOGY
(March/April 1995, pp. 28-35) and Discover. Academic papers on the mummies
were edited by Mair for the 1995 Journal of Indo-European Studies. Film
crews working for Nova and the Discovery channel soon followed Mair to the
deserts of northwestern China; the Discovery show ("The Riddle of the
Desert Mummies") was nominated for an Emmy. In 1996, Mair hosted a
conference of 50 international experts on the archaeology, linguistics, and
physical anthropology of the Central Eurasian societies related to the
mummies; the proceedings were published in two dense and informative
volumes in 1998, and textile specialist Elizabeth Barber issued a book on
the Tarim textiles.
Now Mair has teamed with James Mallory, a distinguished Indo-European
linguist and archaeologist at Queen's University in Belfast, to write The
Tarim Mummies, which explores the difficult and controversial questions
about the languages, identities, technologies, migrations, and physical
traits of the mummies. It is a fascinating and readable account and
presents a valuable compendium of recent research on a little-known region
that has long been the focus of romantic speculation by travelers and
explorers from Marco Polo to Aurel Stein. To determine the ethnic and
linguistic identity of the Tarim mummies requires, as they say, "a feat of
archaeological and linguistic legerdemain," but it is an intriguing game to
follow, for it sheds light on the documentary, linguistic, archaeological,
and skeletal evidence that must be used to attempt a linguistic and ethnic
prehistory of eastern Central Asia.
In the end, their "working hypothesis" is that the earliest Bronze Age
colonists of the Tarim Basin were people of Caucasoid physical type who
entered probably from the north and west, and probably spoke languages that
could be classified as Pre- or Proto-Tocharian, ancestral to the
Indo-European Tocharian languages documented later in the Tarim Basin.
These early settlers occupied the northern and eastern parts of the Tarim
Basin, where their graves have yielded mummies dated about 1800 B.C. They did not arrive from Europe, but probably had lived earlier near the Altai
Mountains, where their ancestors had participated in a cultural world
centered on the eastern steppes of central Eurasia, including modern
northeastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tadjikistan. At the eastern end of
the Tarim Basin, people of Mongoloid physical type began to be buried in
cemeteries such as Yanbulaq some centuries later, during the later second
or early first millennium B.C. About the same time, Iranian-speaking people
moved into the Tarim Basin from the steppes to the west. Their linguistic
heritage and perhaps their physical remains are found in the southern and
western portions of the Tarim. These three populations interacted, as the
linguistic and archaeological evidence reviewed by Mallory and Mair makes
clear, and then Turkic peoples arrived and were added to the mix.
The Tarim Mummies
J.P. Mallory and Victor Mair
New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000
$50.00 (cloth); 352 pages
ISBN 0-500-05101-1
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David W. Anthony is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and codirector of excavations for the Samara Valley Project in Russia.
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© 2001 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/0103/abstracts/books.html |