Digitisation and Advanced Analysis of Archives of Khorezmian Archaeological-Ethnographic Expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (EAP1075)

The project will digitise and research the archive of the famous Khorezmian Archaeological-Ethnographic Expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, which operated from 1937 in Central Asia under the leadership of Sergey Tolstov. The endangered materials are held in the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. With closely defined research aims, this project focuses on aerial and terrestrial photography, plans and maps for an understudied region of northern Turkmenistan, and parts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, yielding unparalleled insights on the region prior to the impact of Soviet collectivisation and irrigation.