'little river cemetery'), also known as Ördek's Necropolis, is a Bronze Age site located in the west of Lop Nur, in Xinjiang, Western China.

[5] The Xiaohe cemetery complex contains the largest number of mummies found at any single site in the world to date.

[6] The bodies are likely to have been transported significant distances for burial at Xiaohe, as no contemporaneous settlement is known to have existed near the tomb complex.

Bergman noted the surprising resemblance in the clothing, especially the fringed loin-cloths, to Bronze Age grave finds in Denmark, but dismissed any direct connection.

In October 2003, an excavation project, organized by the Xinjiang Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute, began at the site.

Each coffin is made of two massive pieces of plank assembled over the body, resembling an overturned boat, and then covered with cowhides.

[13] According to a comment posted on 18 July 2014 by Hui Zhou, one of study's co-authors, the Xiaohe R1a1 lineages belonged to a specifically European branch rather than the more common Central Asian R-Z93[broken anchor].

Instead, although Tocharian may have been plausibly introduced to the Dzungarian Basin by Afanasievo migrants during the Early Bronze Age, the earliest Tarim Basin cultures appear to have arisen from a genetically isolated local population that adopted neighbouring pastoralist and agriculturalist practices, which allowed them to settle and thrive along the shifting riverine oases of the Taklamakan Desert.