Once in a while, however, there truly is a dash of Hollywood-style adventure, as Berkeley archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball discovered during the summer of 1997. On a research expedition to western China, Davis-Kimball and two colleagues found themselves wrapped up in a remarkable ancient mystery spiked with modernday political intrigue.
They were investigating the mummies of the Takla Makan Desert, corpses so well preserved under the arid sands that the trace of a tear still can be seen streaking the face of a child buried 4,000 years ago. The condition of the mummies, excavated at various sites since the early 1900s, surprised the scientists who first found them. But far more startling was the realization that these bodies, buried millennia ago in western China, are Caucasian. They have blond, brown and red hair, prominent noses and deep- set eyes. Some are nearly six feet tall. Buried along with them were textiles woven in plaid patterns strikingly similar to those of ancient European fabrics. Tests on one mummy linked it to a European genetic group.
This caused a clamor in scientific circles. Conventional wisdom has long been that Western people didn't arrive in China until the establishment of the Silk Road, about 2,000 years ago. Chinese scholars have claimed, and Western scholars have agreed, that Chinese culture evolved in isolation, apart from the influence of Europe. The Caucasian mummies of the Takla Makan proved otherwise, indicating that Europeans forged eastward thousands of years before anyone thought and built a thriving agricultural society in what's now China's Xinjiang Province.
Davis-Kimball and her team, with support from the PBS program "Nova," went to Xinjiang to find out just who the mummy people were, and what became of them. But they soon discovered that not everyone wants that information made known. Proof that Caucasians were living in the region 4,000 years ago clearly refutes China's claim of historical sovereignty there -- and, more important, challenges its hold on the oil-rich province of Xinjiang. "There's oil down there," Davis-Kimball says. "That's the reason it has to be part of China."
The people native to this area of central Asia are a Turkic ethnic group called Uighurs (WE-gurs). They trace their ties to the region back to around 800 A.D., when their Turkic ancestors moved there and, anthropologists believe, mixed with a people known as the Tocharians. The Tocharians, who were Buddhists, are thought to have built and ruled a string of cities along the central Asian stretch of the Silk Road. Study of Tocharian manuscripts has revealed that they used a language closely related to Celtic and Germanic tongues; their paintings reveal them to have been a fair-haired, blue-eyed people. These distinctive characteristics have caused many scholars to link them with the mummy people, who predated them.
Here's where the story gets political. The Uighur majority in Xinjiang now chafes under Chinese rule. There were Uighur uprisings in 1990 and '97, which were summarily crushed by the Chinese Army. To strengthen its hand in the region, the Chinese government has flooded Xinjiang with some 6 million ethnic Han Chinese. Though the region contains one-third of China's oil reserves, 95 percent of the Uighur population lives in poverty. The Uighurs protest that China has polluted their homeland with industrial toxics and radiation (this is where China couducts its nuclear tests). China has responded harshly to the dissent. Amnesty International reports that "a pattern of human rights violations has emerged in Xinjiang since 1989."
China supports it claim to Xinjiang with a myth promulgated since Mao took control of the region in the '40s: that China developed in isolation and that this area has always been part of China -- even though the name Xinjiang means "new territory."
Uighurs have seized upon the mummy pople as proof that their homeland is historically distinct from China. When Davis-Kimball went to Xinjiang she stepped into what is lterally a battle over the area's history, with a mummies at the center.
"They were Caucasoid," David-Kimball says. "This is a no-no for Beijing."
Such a "no-no" that the government has long been loath to allow foreign researchers into the region. Though the mummies were discovered at the beginning of this century, it has been hard to get access to them for the past few decades. More than 30 camera crews had applied to document the story of the mummies and were rejeted before the Chinese government gave the go-ahead to a joint project of "Nova" and England's Channel 4.
Throughout their stay, the team of Davis-Kimball, China historian Victor Mair and forensic anthropologist Charlotte Roberts were closely monitored by Chinese officials. The officials even went so far as to plan an elaborate hoax to mislead them, Davis-Kimball says.
On a grave dig supervised by government chaperones, the team was led to an obviously disturbed tomb that comtained a mummy that had been neatly decapitated. Davis-Kimball and the others concluded that the government had cut the mummy's head off to prevent the team from capturing a Caucasian face on film.
"They had taken the head off so that we would not photograph the Indo- European head, "Davis-Kimball says.
The team had seen the same mummy, intact, along with several others in the back room of a small local museum a short time before the sham excavation. Inn the Nova program -- entitled "Mysterious Mummies of China" -- Mair says he noticed fungal growth on the corpse that indicated the body had been recently moved. (The office of the Chineses Consulate did not respond to requests for a response to these charges.)
The team also had trouble getting into some of the regional museums, where many of the hundreds of mummies that have been unearthed are stored. Often, Chinese officials would give them permission to visit, only to change their minds soon after. "We were on this yo-yo all the time," Davis-Kimball says. "We never knew what was going to happen next."
So Davis-Kimball and colleagues resorted to a little Indiana Jones-style subterfuge of their own. With the help of a sympathetic local scholar, they snuck into one key museum at midnight, avoiding the scrutiny of wary Chinese officials.
"I kept thinking, how terrible that we had to stay up all night just to photograph something that scientists should be able to study," she says.
Davis-Kimall has made her mark in the field of archaeology with a bold, no-nonsense approach. A silver-haired woman who's comfortable in jeans and a sweatshirt (but would rather not discuss her age), she entered the scholarly world late in life, after raising six children and working as a nurse and a convalescent-hospital administrator. She supervised the renovation work on a Berkeley apartment building that she owns with her husband, Warren Matthew, and the two manage several properties in the city.
A combination of business savvy and intellectual curiosity led her to found her own research institute after earning a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's Near Eastern Studies department a decade ago. The university declined to work closely with some Kazakhstan researchers she'd contacted - Davis-Kimball had been just the second Western scholar to receive a welcome in the then-Soviet state - so she started the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads in her north Berkeley home. The center, in turn, laid the groudwork for her first major breakthrough, when Russian scholars invited her to excavate burial mounds in Pokrovka, on the Russia-Kazakhstan border.
There she unearthed the bodies of women buried with swords, daggers, arrowheads and other tools of war. Further research led her to conclude that these women had ridden horses and fought in battle between 600 B.C. and 400 B.C., and that their tribe, the Sauromatians, may have been one of the many real-life nomad groups who inspired the Amazon legend. News of Davis-Kimball's discovery traveled quickly. The New York Times, NBC and a host of magazines from around the globe featured her in stories.
Still, the attention hasn't translated into academic easy street. Davis- Kimball's nonprofit center isn't part of UC Berkeley or any other university, and relies on grants and pay-as-you-go archaeological digs in central Asia. Students who sign up for the expeditions cover their own costs - and sometimes Davis-Kimball's. She draws no salary from the center. She and Matthew depend on rent from the apartments they own and some retirement income.
Aside from her "Amazons" discovery, Davis-Kimball's work in the Central Asian steppes has been less than glamorous - at least to those outside a small scholarly community. The area she studies - what's now Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, southern Russia, western China and Mongolia - has been a black hole on the map of most Westerners. Our attention is drawn to China, India, Iran and Moscow.
That's now changing, as the former territories of the Soviet Union come into their own and their natural resources become more important. But awareness of the region is still dim, as evidenced by the widespread belief that China evolved in isolation from other cultures.
Since the 1960s the concept of cultural diffusion has been downplayed as an explanation for similarities shared by distantly separated societies. The politically correct philosophy has been that far-flung societies must have evolved independent of one another. Finds such as the Takla Makan mummies are now forcing a reexamination of diffusionism. Archaeologists have discovered evidence that whelled wagons were first brought to China from the West thousands of years ago. Among the colorful woven clothing found in the mummies' graves are hats identical to ancient hats found in Austria and southern China.
The "Nova" program speculates that the mummy people originated in Eastern Europe, near the Black Sea. This conclusion is based partly on some striking petroglyphs found on a massive 500-foot-tall rock outcropping. The carvings - which seem to show a fertility dance, a crucial concern for ancient people with infant mortality rates of 33 percent or higher - are distinctive for their triangular torsos and 90-degree arm positions. The only other place where similar images have been found - by Davis-Kimball and other shcolars - is in Moldova, a region between Romania and Ukraine, near the Black Sea.
Ancient artworks also helped strengthen the link between the mummy people and the later Tocharians. At the top of a sheer cliff, deep in a complex of caves filled with Tocharian script, Mair found ancient paintings of fair-haired, blue-eyed people that closely resemble the mummies.
Altogether, the findings from the expedition indicate that what's now western China was in fact occupied by non-ethnically Chinese people well before theh Silk Road was established, and that those people later built cities along the trade route - cities that fostered much of the important cultural exchange between East and West.
"It really was a fulcrum," says British filmmaker Howard Reid, organizer of the expedition. Everyone had sort of assumed it was the Chinese who built these cities, or maybe the Indians. But it wasn't. It was the mummy people."
Davis-Kimball and her fellow scholars all came home from China concerned about the Chinese government's restrictions on travel and study in the region. Among their biggest worries is that the mummies and their artifacts may be silenced permanently: the delicate bodies, fabrics and tools are disintegrating quickly due to the poor conditions under which they're kept.
"They'll be lost," Davis-Kimball says. "And this is valuable historical material for reconstructing the evolution of mankind - of peoplekind."
