Anau excavations and the oasis hypothesis
Excavaciones de Anau y la hipótesis del oasis
- Date
- 1904 · confidence high
- Place
- Anau, Ahal, Turkmenistan
- Credited to
- Raphael Pumpelly (Carnegie expedition) and Hubert Schmidt
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
The first stratigraphic excavation of a tell in Central Asia, with a sequence of cultures from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Pumpelly proposed that climatic drying concentrated people and animals in oases and caused domestication.
The oasis hypothesis, now discarded by palaeoclimatic data, should not be confused with the value of the stratigraphic sequence, which remains useful.
What it led to
- the reference sequence (Anau I-III, Namazga) for ancient Turkmenistan archaeology
- the oasis theory, taken up by V. Gordon Childe in 1928
- forerunner of Soviet scientific archaeology in Central Asia