The Archeology of Lost Affection

By Victor H. Mair

Three photographs, discarded in the dust outside Qumul train station, Xinjiang, each carefully torn to remove one man while preserving the other.

For the American scholar who picks them up they present an irresistible challenge. Who, when, and why? What is the story behind these artifacts of the modern age?

This reconstruction, a cre

• Language: English
• Publisher: Camphor Press Ltd
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781788692274

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The Archeology of Lost Affection

The Archeology of

Lost Affection

Victor H. Mair

A Camphor Press book

Published by Camphor Press Ltd

83 Ducie Street, Manchester, M1 2JQ

United Kingdom

www.camphorpress.com

© 2021 Victor H. Mair.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN 978-1-78869-227-4

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form if binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For Shuheng (Diana) Zhang

Preface

As the title indicates, this is a book about archeological investigation. The field exploration it describes took place in May 1998. During the following months, I worked in laboratories, libraries, and archives on the artifacts that were recovered, and finished writing up my report a year later, in 1999. As such, this work itself is a historical artifact of sorts, in that it was written more than twenty years ago, before most people took all their photos on cell phones and seldom printed copies on photo paper. Yet the primary data for this inquiry consist of three torn fragments of photographs taken on film.

I have made no attempt to update or modify any of the findings of my original archeological report of 1999. Consequently, readers should put themselves in the framework of that time period and experience things as they happened more than two decades ago. Travel was very different then, cityscapes were not the same as now, and communications were completely unlike those of the present time — especially in China, where there have been such incredible transformations in nearly all aspects of life.

As readers will soon discover, this report is full of questions, some of which are answered, but many of which are not. Readers are invited to make their own proposals for questions that remain unanswered, given the evidence I have assembled and laid out in this volume.

The Archeology of Lost Affection

1

I am a specialist on the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age mummies of Eastern Central Asia. Technically speaking, they’re not really mummies in the narrow, etymological sense of the word, because no artificial, human intervention was required for the astonishing preservation of these two-thousand to four-thousand-year-old bodies. Rather, their superb condition is the natural result of desiccation brought about by the extreme aridity of the region, plus the high salinity of the soils and the bitterly cold winters.

When I first began lecturing on this subject, I referred to the dried-out bodies as desiccated corpses. But members of the audiences before whom I spoke would invariably come up to the podium afterward and complain that this expression sounded too gruesome and ghoulish, that it scared the little children who happened to come along with their parents. After I started to style them mummies, however, everybody was happy and found them much more approachable and, indeed, loveable in a macabre sort of way.

Regardless of what we call them, I have willy-nilly become a world-renowned authority on the physical remains of these mostly Europoid ancient peoples and on their cultures. During the past decade, I have led a series of expeditions to Eastern Central Asia to study the physical anthropology, genetics, languages, textiles, diet, diseases, and many other aspects of the mummies, have organized international conferences to debate their significance, and have authored numerous books and articles about them.

In drawing up the present report, however, I must confess that I find myself in a bit of an archeological quandary. The problem is that I do not know whether what I am writing should be considered fiction. In my profession, we pride ourselves on sticking to the facts, as much as possible. Admittedly, after an archeologist has described in minute detail all of the data that he has accumulated, he may well attempt to interpret them in some meaningful fashion or at least to draw certain inferences that would enable others to incorporate his findings within a larger framework.

In the present case, however, my primary evidence is severely restricted. It consists entirely of three photographic shards, as it were. While we have only these three fragments to go on, we can extract a tremendous amount of information from them and from the context in which they were found. In this report, I shall endeavor to record as fully and precisely as possible the facts presented by the fragmentary photographs that I excavated (that is the correct word; I literally exhumed them from the soil). The story they tell, insofar as I have been able to decipher it, is a strangely evocative one, despite the fact that the players in it are unnamed and could scarcely be earthier.

2

The site where the shards were discovered is in the eastern part of Xinjiang, the westernmost region of China. This is China’s Siberia — a distant, forbidding place that is perfectly suited for sending troublesome people into exile. The full, official name of this vast tract of land, constituting fully one-sixth of the whole territory of the People’s Republic of China, is the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region: Xinjiang (literally New Borders) because it was incorporated into the Chinese empire — by the Manchus — only toward the end of the nineteenth century, Uyghur being the ethnonym of the Turkic-speaking minority people who actually constitute a majority of the population, Autonomous to signify that the Uyghurs supposedly run their own government (a claim that I, as an impartial scientist, will refrain from commenting upon), and Region (following Soviet-style nomenclature) to indicate that this is not a regular province but a special administrative area like Hong Kong. At