The archive was created by 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 digitised here are held in the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. With consideration of significance and previous efforts, this project focuses primarily on aerial photography and plans for an understudied region of Aral Sea area (northern Turkmenistan, and parts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) in Central Asia. The expedition pioneered multidisciplinary approaches and was first to implement aerial and terrestrial documentation of archaeological landscapes systematically on a grand scale. Although published outputs are well-known, the materials under consideration were never digitised or catalogued due to lack of time and resources.
Arrangement: The collection of materials digitised here were not arranged as a regular archive. The collection is a build-up of different files from different periods of work of the Khorezmian Archaeological-Ethnographic Expedition and they were placed without a rigid system of cataloguing. The project deliberately targeted the materials and files that were considered to be endangered because of the lack of detailed arrangement. Each file contains items that are thematically or otherwise related to one another, and notes and titles of each file provide a context to the materials.
Author(s)/Creator(s): Khorezmian Archaeological-Ethnographic Expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
