Chorasmian Expedition

He spent the rest of his life exploring the archaeology of Chorasmia (Khorezm, Khwarazm), the region southeast of the Aral Sea and between the rivers Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya which today is part of the post-Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

[1] For his expedition, he collected a team made up mainly of current and former students of the Archaeology Department at Moscow State University (MGU) where Tolstov himself had graduated.

[4] In addition to the standard archaeological methods of field survey and excavation, the expedition systematically used aerial photography, with at least two biplanes from 1946 onwards.

The Chorasmian Expedition also included architects, physical anthropologists, soil scientists and topographers; the latter drew up a map of the ancient irrigation systems across the region.

[6] Earlier, this civilization had been known only from ancient written sources (Greek, Persian, Chinese), and from short reports by early explorers of the area.

His Chorasmian Expedition enjoyed extremely generous support and research funding from the Soviet government and the authorities of constituent republics.

[9] These projects (canals, irrigation networks, hydroelectric power stations and roads, and the partial diversion of the flow of Siberian rivers to Central Asia) necessitated previous archaeological work which was supported by a Soviet type of ‘developer funding’ legally required since 1934.

[10] The complete archive of the Chorasmian Expedition is located at Moscow, in the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology (IEA) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN).

Kurmankulov (Almaty, Kazakhstan), I. Arzhantseva (Moscow) and H. Härke (Tübingen, Germany); this project was funded by the German Gerda Henkel Foundation.