Sod removed from new excavation, Tuzusai, 2012

Claudia Chang, professor of archaeology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, is director of an international field research project on the archaeology of the Iron Age in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Throughout the exhibition Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, on view through November 12, Claudia will share her ongoing field work with us on Bento.

Yesterday, our 17-year-old neighbor Nazerke came to our dig site to practice her English. In school Kazakh students have learned about the crude stone tools found in Kazakhstan dating back to the period of Homo erectus (1.8 million to 400,000 years ago). “Wouldn’t it be great to find actual fossil evidence of early humans in Kazakhstan?” Nazerke exclaimed.

Through our archaeological work, our research team expects to learn more about the history of human culture in Kazakhstan. This is important to understanding the context of the objects on display in Nomads and Networks, now on view in Washington, DC.

We are working in Tuzusai. Meaning “salty place” in Kazakh, Tuzusai is an Iron Age site that dates from 400 BCE to 100 CE. In 1991, the year Kazakhstan became independent from the USSR, local archaeologist Feydor P. Grigoriev began excavating the settlement. Our team began excavations here three years later. In 1995, when Feydor worked with us on the Kazakh-American Archaeological Expedition, we spent hours discussing our childhood memories of the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War. Now American and Kazakhstani citizens can work on an archaeological dig together. How times have changed!

Over the years, more crew members have joined our dig, often through word of mouth, and taken on a variety of roles. Alec, one of the workmen on the site, also drives the 1994 four-wheel-drive Uhas. Lyuba is responsible for keeping track of the finds, especially the diagnostic pottery fragments: rims, bottoms, handles, and spouts. She writes down the coordinates for each special find and its depth. Perry, my husband, is the transit man, taking all the elevation readings of the excavation units. He uses a thirty-year-old Leitz mountain transit, a surveying instrument for measuring, and reads the elevations from a stadia mark. I take the notes and direct the dig.

To communicate, our team has gained a solid command of “dig Russian.” Last year the Tuzusai dig was multilingual: Kazakh, Russian, and English. This, of course, reflects the nature of language use in Kazakhstan. Kazakh, a Turkic language, has been the national language since Kazakhstan declared independence. Russian is the language of international communications, and English is taught in schools. At our excavations, there is no telling when different languages, cultures, or conceptual ideas may lead to confusion. Still, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Digging an archaeological site is always challenging. This week began slowly. We started by removing the weeds and backfill on last year’s pit houses, storage pits, and a tandoor. We also laid out a grid of 2 m x 2 m square units in an area north of our old excavations. We take down each of our grid units layer by layer, recording the depths for each level. We have now almost finished opening our old excavation units and removing the upper sod levels from our new excavation units.

Our team hopes to learn the history of everyday men and women living on the edge of the Tian Shan Mountains, as well as of the elite, horse-riding warriors who controlled vast regions of the Eurasian steppe. We would like to know what connections exist between the nomadic elite buried in the kurgans and the herders and farmers who lived in the Talgar area during the first millennia BCE. Nomads and Networks is thus not only an appropriate title for the exhibition in the Freer|Sackler, but also could be a motto for our summers in the field.

Next up: Everyday life in the Iron Age.

From Bollywood to bindi, our Inspired by India family celebration had something for everyone. The day’s events are almost over, but Bollywood film Mugal-e-Azam starts at 5:30.

Kathak dancer Prachi Dalal.

Prachi Dalal performs in a program of traditional kathak dance. These include stories from the temple traditions of storytelling, courtly customs, and royal challenges as well as songs of mysticism, devotion, passion, and play. The next (and final) performance begins at 3pm in the Meyer Auditorium.

Cupcakes with the flavors of India.

The Indian palette is filled with vibrant colors, but the Indian palate…ah, that’s a different story. Thanks to Fraiche Cupcakery, we can not only admire India, but we can get a literal taste as well. Find these yummy cupcakes made with rosewater, pistachio, and cardamom, in the Freer courtyard (and don’t miss the red velvet). According to Fraiche owner, Nina Deva, “We take flavors from different cultures and combine them. It takes a lot of experimenting.” Come and try the delicious results yourself!

In honor of Inspired by India and Worlds within Worlds, Nirupama Rao, the Ambassador of India to the United States, leads a traditional lamplighting ceremony as an auspicious start to this family festival.”India is not easy to embrace in a moment,” she told the overflowing crowds, “You need a lifetime.” Today, I’m sure, is a good place to start…

Rangoli, the art of painted prayers.

Led by Gayatri Mohan-Iyengar, local Indian women demonstrate the rich tradition of creating complex images on the ground with rice powder. In India, women paint simpler designs on their doorstep each morning and create more complex varieties at weddings and other celebrations.

As David Nash, educator at Freer|Sackler explained to me, “It’s a meditative art, often done at dawn to welcome the new day. The birds and ants then eat the rice powder so that it gradually all but disappears, symbolizing the power of impermanence.”

Working closely on rangoli in the Freer courtyard.

The event goes on until 3pm in the Freer courtyard and is part of Inspired by India: A Family Celebration, in honor of the new exhibition Worlds within Worlds: Imperial Paintings from India and Iran.

Learning how to dance Bollywood style.

Bollywood dancing literally kicked off our Inspired by India Family Festival. Ever want to dance like a Bollywood star? You’ll get another chance at 4pm when Nepalese performer Bhim Dahal teaches dance sequences seen in musical films from Mumbai, the Hollywood of India. Lights…Camera…Bollywood!

Claudia Chang recording sherds in an irrigation ditch, wearing what she calls her “characteristic garb”: Waldo hat, pocket T-shirt, gray dig pants, and bandana.

Claudia Chang, professor of archaeology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, is director of an international field research project on the archaeology of the Iron Age in the Republic of Kazakhstan. She has been a Fulbright Teaching Fellow at Kazakh State University and wrote an article in the catalogue for Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, on view in the Sackler August 11–November 12, 2012. Throughout the exhibition, Claudia will share her field work with us on Bento.

In late May, the temperature in the region of Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, can range from the 50s in the early morning to the high 80s by noon. The winter wheat is a foot high and sways in the gentle breeze. Outside our little village 21 km (13 miles) from Almaty, large fields of soy crop have been seeded. The seedlings are about 2 inches in height. For a survey archaeologist the conditions are ideal; we can still walk between the rows of soy crop looking for ancient ceramics, sheep and cattle bones, broken river cobbles, and grinding stones. As we walk transect after transect in fields that are almost a kilometer (0.6 miles) in length, we inspect the soft, crunchy topsoil known as “loess” for ancient artifacts. Loess is wind-blown glacial mud that was deposited millennia ago and covers the gently sloping valley just below the foothills of the Tian Shan mountain range, which along with the Hindu Kush, Himalayas, and Pamirs form the highest peaks in Eurasia. This thick layer of loess is pay dirt for today’s farmers as it was for the Iron Age farmers and herders of the first millennium BCE. It is rich in nutrients and in this semi-arid climate is excellent for crops or pastureland.

Soybean field west of Tseganka

During the Soviet period, which ended in the early 1990s, many of these fields were planted by collectives; now the land is privatized or managed by cooperatives. Soviet period and contemporary agriculture have been a boon to the survey archaeologist. Tractors used to cultivate the fields have churned up the topsoil, and buried artifacts have been plowed up and exposed to rain and the elements. We often think that the richest scatters of artifacts, 50 or more pieces of ancient bones or sherds per 10-meter (33-foot) radius, are the places where the plow has dug into an ancient settlement or burial mound.

In uncultivated patches of land, it is still possible to see large Iron Age burial mounds, or kurgans, constructed of layers of earth and rocks that cover the burial pits or shafts where elite members of society were buried. In groups of 3 to 9, these burial mounds line old stream beds near the scatters of sherds and bones found on surveys. The Iron Age kurgans were treasure troves of valuable artifacts before they were robbed in antiquity and in the recent past. Today, they are visible markers of the graves of important members of Iron Age society, the aristocratic elites. Who were these elites and how did they earn their wealth and status?

Many of the hundreds of kurgans located in the Talgar region where we work have been destroyed by modern development of roads, construction, and large-scale industrial agriculture. But even though it has been flattened by modern farm machinery, a destroyed kurgan can sometimes be found as a tiny rise in a plowed agriculture field, and it is possible that the grave shaft is still intact.

When we find traces of kurgans or scatters of artifacts, we record their locations using a GPS device. Nowadays we can accurately pinpoint the location of a single ceramic sherd using satellite readings from our handheld GPS. When we return from six hours of field walking, these points can be plotted on Google Earth images that show the exact contours of the fields. By recording even a single grinding stone or ceramic fragment, we have traced out the boundaries of settlements that might lay buried below the plowed surfaces. The combination of field walking with the use of contemporary technology allows us to reconstruct how the ancient nomads and farmers of the Iron Age altered the natural landscapes of our study region.

More than 35 years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I learned how to find sites in the American Southwest by looking for artifact scatters on the desert and mountainous terrain of Arizona. In those days each site location had to be located on US Geological Survey topographic maps, using a Brunton compass to triangulate our position by aligning it with mountain peaks or stream bends. It could sometimes take 15 minutes or longer to pinpoint an exact location. These days we can just walk along with a notebook, a GPS unit, and some collection bags.

I find it astounding that new high-speed computing, satellite imagery, and good hard field work can produce excellent results that tell us more about the landscapes used by ancient people, the size of their settlements, and the nature of their ceremonial and burial practices. As an old school friend tells me, “It seems to me that doing archaeology is like solving a big puzzle that requires detective work.” After a long day of walking amongst the soy plants, there is nothing better than being able to come home, plot our artifact scatters or kurgan locations on a Google Earth map, and see the pieces fit together.

Next up: a look at the Iron Age excavation site at Tuzusai (“salty place”).

Horned Deer with Folded Legs, Two-Sided; Zhalauli (Kegen district, Almaty region), 7th–6th century BCE

Alex Nagel, assistant curator of ancient Near Eastern art at Freer|Sackler, is the in-house curator of the exhibition Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, opening August 11.

For me, Kazakhstan is first of all a beautiful and stunning landscape: wide open, green grasslands; glittering, crystal-blue rivers and lakes; and high mountains in the east and the Caspian Sea in the west. A country four times bigger than Texas and almost the size of India, Kazakhstan is rich with history and home to wild tulips, oil, nomads who still hunt with golden eagles, and more than one hundred nationalities. Bordering Russia to the north and China to the east, Kazakhstan is today the world’s ninth largest country and has emerged as one of the most fascinating places in Central Asia.

East Kazakhstan, Lake Markakol, © Embassy of Kazakhstan, Washington, DC

Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, on view in the Sackler from August 11 through November 12, 2012, features spectacular finds from recent excavations that provide a unique window into the archaeology and cultures of Kazakhstan. The exhibition invites viewers to think about the ways nomadic and more sedentary cultures lived together. How did members of the elite represent themselves through burials of their leaders? Why was the horse so elaborately dressed and valued as a friend and partner?

The exhibition was conceptualized, developed, and organized by New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in collaboration with the Ministries of Culture and Information and of Science and Education, Republic of Kazakhstan, and four major national museums in Kazakhstan and the Embassy of Kazakhstan in Washington, DC. It marks the first time that ancient artifacts from the very heart of Asia will be displayed in the nation’s capital. We will complement it with related special programming including gallery talks, lectures, a concert, ImaginAsia family programs, and films.

On Bento, we will cover some of the exciting discoveries made in Kazakhstan. Claudia Chang, professor at Sweet Briar College and one of the preeminent US archaeologists working in Kazakhstan today, has been exploring the sedentary places of the ancient people living in the Talgar region since 1994. This summer, Claudia excavates at the site of Tuzusai in eastern Kazakhstan, near the old capital of Almaty. Beginning next week, she will regularly blog her experiences in the field.

Curator Alex Nagel at the Smithsonian Congress of Scholars tent, Folklife Festival, July 2, 2012

London native Rohan Ayinde Smith is currently an intern in the Freer|Sackler Archives. This post takes him out of the Archives and onto the National Mall.

The Smithsonian staff picnic boiled away on Monday, July 2, from 11 am till 2 pm, and saw a host of Smithsonian employees ambling, somewhat laden by heat, across the Mall with ice-cold smoothies in hand and sweat patches pooling on their backs. I sat watching this from the relative cool of the 2012 Smithsonian Congress of Scholars (SCOS) research tent, thinking how lucky I was to sit in adequate comfort, above ground (unlike the F|S offices), and without having to stare at a computer for hours.

However, if I thought my day was going to be as easy as sitting around people-watching, I was grossly mistaken. From about 11:30 am there was a steady stream of traffic to and from our table, with people asking a vast array of questions about the pigment project that Alexander Nagel, assistant curator of Ancient Near Eastern Art at Freer|Sackler, has been working on for the past six years. Alex has been collaborating with a team of colleagues in Persepolis (Iran) to determine the original colors of the site through documenting small traces of pigments found there. These pigment marks have not only been found in Persepolis, but also at other ancient sites such as Pasargadae (also in Iran) and Palmyra (Syria).

In the SCOS research tent we spoke about the recent findings and discussed what they illuminate about these ancient sites. Ultimately, we explained, the pigments allow us to understand what these cities would have looked like. They give us insight into a culture that we used to think was very pristine and whitewashed, allowing us strip away that fallacy and build an extremely different picture of these cities—one that is covered in vibrant colors. From painted monuments to frescoes, the grand buildings on these sites were decorated elaborately. It is a grand shift in the way we view ancient civilizations and may change many of our perceptions of the past.

One of the most interesting pieces we discussed was a stone relief excavated at Palmyra that had traces of pigments on it. The relief, which is part of the F|S collection,  is one of about 5,000 found at the site, all representations of the people in the tombs they were guarding. The color present on this relief is again evidence of how vibrant these cities would have been; even the dead were housed in elaborately painted tombs.

As the day went on, Alex and I were faced with a number of interesting questions, observations, and suggestions. It was rewarding that people took so much interest. They were fully engaged and particularly fascinated with the notion that the past was so much more colorful than some had believed. Of the many questions that were asked over the course of the day, the ones that popped up most frequently were those related to the conservation of the pigments; whether  the colors used were part of a grander, interlinked scheme that crossed cultures and civilizations; and whether there was going to be an effort to restore these sites to their former painted state once ample evidence was collected.

Regarding conservation of the pigments, Alex explained, it would do more damage to try to apply something to conserve them than just leaving them as they have been for the past 2500 years. Instead, glass covers have been put in front of many of the places where significant pigmentation has been found so it cannot be touched. As for whether these colorings are indicative of a cross-cultural exchange, we explained that many of the materials used to color the palaces and monuments at Persepolis, at least, were garnered locally, and that the copper compound used to make blue and the ochre used to make red could both be found in Iran. This does not indicate a cross-cultural exchange, but equally does not rule it out.

The most controversial issue was the question of whether the sites would be repainted. There seemed to be two camps of people in regard to this notion. There were those who thought it would be atrocious to dream of doing such a thing, and there were those who thought it was a necessary step in the restoration process. It was intriguing to see the dialogue develop over the course of the day and see what different people had to offer on the topic.

Personally, I feel that to restore the sites back to their original colors would interfere too much with the course of history. It is part of the historical record that the colors have disappeared. As a result, we should respect that passage of time and be content that, with today’s technology, we are able to recreate the sites with digital technology and possibly even build 3D models in full color. To do anything more would just be out of line.

What is your opinion?