About that book on archaeology you are reading, Blue..
You say the excavations took place in the Uigur region -- in Xinjiang, in other words. One of the interesting things about the Uigurs (a Turkic people)is that to this day you can still find some blue-eyed blonds among them. In general, the "Turkic" ethno-linguistic group is the only one I can think of off-hand that includes individuals of different races. Compare a Kazakh or a Kyrgyz (clearly members of the "yellow" race) to a North Caucasian Balkar (fair-skinned) or to an Anatolian Turk (pure Mediterranean "olive-skinned" type, usually), and it's impossible to speak of them as belonging to a single "race," let alone a single "ethnic group."
All that migrating and conquering back and forth certainly made for a lot of "blending"! And so far as I know, nobody really is sure what "race" the "original" Turks belonged to. They blended with the Mongols pretty early on, during the first wave of outmigration, but before that? Does your book throw any light on that question?
I never thought of becoming an archaeologist myself; I knew that a lot of it was really grunge work -- digging and digging in the dirt under a hot sun or in the rain, and perhaps never finding anything at all.
My dream -- briefly -- was to be an astronomer. Learn the secrets of the cosmos! Wow! But then I found out that it was all mathematics! Ugh! And even if you did get to play with the telescope, that too was likely to be grunge work. Days and days and days of watching, getting a stiff neck and a sore back, and even then perhaps never ever seeing anything new!
So much for our youthful dreams...<sniff>....
Joan |
