Nexus - 0805 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

LMH: That sounds like it would support a large population. Do you have any sense of the number of people, and what was the water source? Were there any wells underground or any kind of nearby river source? Prof. Hiebert: It's really hard to predict how many people would live in a particular building or how long a building was occupied, whether people were living in one part and then another part. It seems that these large building complex- es would support hundreds of people; probably not thousands. They are not as big as a tradi- tional ancient city, but their organisation and the density of rooms in them suggest it would be a fairly large population for that area. About the water source. Clearly, water was the key to life out in the middle of the desert. And the only way that people could have lived out there is if they took a local river—and there were rivers that ran out into the desert—and modify the delta of the river. In other words, where the river snakes out into the desert, rather than letting it form a giant jungle morass of thickets, the people must have cut down the thickets and cleared irrigation canals. Once they did that, they took that desert oasis and made it bloom. Can you LMH: And it sounds as if this was happening in Mesopotamia, imagine that, 4,000 years ago, making a desert bloom? Egypt, Central Asia, all at the same time, all back much further than 2 Professor Fredrik Hiebert, holding oldest ceramic pottery shard dated around 3500 BC from the Anau, Turkmenistan, archaeological site. Another Turkmenistan shard near his hand is a 15th-century AD blue-and-white copy of a traditional Chinese pattern. Centre is a jagged cylindrical vase dated to around 2500 BC. Next to it is a delicate, well-pre- served vase, also dated to 2500 BC. On the silk square is the carved "bone tube", circa 2000 BC. (Photograph by Linda Moulton Howe) did that, they took that desert oasis and made it bloom. Can you LMH: And it sounds as if this was happening in Mesopotamia, imagine that, 4,000 years ago, making a desert bloom? Egypt, Central Asia, all at the same time, all back much further than anyone ever realised. LMH: Well, it happened in Egypt along the Nile. Prof. Hiebert: Yes. One of the things that intrigues us all is to Prof. Hiebert: It certainly did. And in many ways, these imagine a system that we had previously thought may have exist- Central Asian desert oases are like the Nile, in which you could ed only 2,000 years ago when the Romans were in power in the have one foot in a lush oasis and one foot in the sand right at the | Mediterranean and the Han Dynasty was the great imperial power edge. in China. Now we are pushing that back thousands of years earli- er than that, into the Bronze Age. One of our questions is about how much trade was going on among them. Was there actually a Bronze Age Silk Road, a 4,000-year-old Silk Road? I don't think we're yet able to answer that, but we can talk about the importance of these desert oases as a pre-Silk Road civilisation. LMH: Nov, on the table with us, it almost looks as if I am looking at delft china. How did this blue and white, delicate pattern come to be in Central Asia along with these other pieces? What are we looking at? How old is it and where did you find it? Prof. Hiebert: On the table in front of us is a series of pot- tery shards. A pottery shard is a part of a pot that was broken. These pottery shards are the best thing we have in archaeology because when the pots are broken, people throw them away. These are the remains we find most commonly on the dig. So I have a selection of ceramic shards which represent the time- scale we have from Central Asia. The first piece we have is the blue and white ceramic that has a bird or dragon on it and these curly designs that do remind us of delft ceramics. This is a 15th-century AD Silk Road pot. It would have been locally made, but it would have been made in imitation of Chinese blue and white. And what's interesting about this is that in Central Asia they were making imitations of Chinese blue and white. And in Europe they were also making 7.) A ae . 4 +2 | imitations of Chinese blue and white. It was sort of the Coca- This small (1.3 x 1.4 cm) shiny black jet stone, carved with an inscription Cola signature of the past. emphasised with a reddish pigment, was found at the Anau site in June © Moving on chronologically, we turn to another well-made 2000 by Professor Hiebert; it was in a layer of charcoal carbon dated at pot. It's so thin [he knocks on it], you can hear how finely 2300 BC. (Photograph courtesy Prof. Fredrik T. Hiebert) made it is. LMH: Well, it happened in Egypt along the Nile. Prof. Hiebert: It certainly did. And in many ways, these Central Asian desert oases are like the Nile, in which you could have one foot in a lush oasis and one foot in the sand right at the edge. NEXUS +57 AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2001 www.nexusmagazine.com