Buried Cultures, Budding Scholars

Professor C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky

Archaeologist C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky
Remembers 25 Years at the Harvard Extension School

I have loved teaching in the Extension School," declares "Carl" Lamberg-Karlovsky, Harvard's Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology and the 2001-2002 25-year honorand at the Harvard Extension School.

We are sitting at one end of the long seminar table in his office at the Peabody Museum, surrounded by towering file cases, a profusion of wall posters announcing expeditions to Central Asia and the Middle East, and, most strikingly, a sampling of the stone, ceramic, and metal objects, some 4,000 years old, that Lamberg-Karlovsky has liberated from sandy depths during four decades of archaeological campaigns. Now the internationally recognized scholar is packing and getting his shots for another trip, this time to Pakistan. At 64, he shows no sign of fatigue. He grows excited at the opportunity to expound on subjects he knows so well: the rise and fall of ancient worlds, and teaching Extension School students.

"I particularly like teaching those who have been out of school for a period of time and want to reconstitute their education. Often, something along the way has happened, sometimes very serious, to interrupt their formal training. But now they are back, with a passion for learning that is different from that of my students in the College. Many of them will not miss a class, or even a word."

"Others have a special passion for archaeology, perhaps because it is so foreign to their own field of endeavor. I remember a gentleman who always sat in the back row, extremely well-dressed, with a slick attaché case. He didn't say anything to me for the entire semester. He sat there every class and took notes. I didn't know whether he was taking the class or just sitting in on it. I later learned that he was the founder and CEO of Lotus Development Corporation."

Extension School students have long reciprocated Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky's appreciation. "Fantastic," "superb," "engrossing" are some of the praises jotted on student evaluations of ANTH E-141 Comparative Civilizations of Eurasia in recent years. "He catapulted us into his sense of timelessness," one student wrote. Another wrote, "He was extremely reflective and open-minded, and this created an environment of investigation. Thank you!" "A gracious and impressive instructor," offered a third. "His absolute love of the subject and his passion for communicating it was both evident and addictive."

Perhaps the most revealing tribute to Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky's mastery as a scholar and a teacher came from a student who praised his "ignorance." "By this I mean that his grasp and command of the materials available in his field is so great that he is unashamed to admit that, in some cases, there are no answers. Indeed, he will often respond to a student's question with a broad grin and an 'I--and we--do not know!' And then he will give the three contending theories on the subject, with the evidence for and against each one. This class has been an inspiring demonstration of scholarship at the highest level--and rollicking good fun, too!"

The "rollicking good fun" of a career in archaeology may not be everyone's cup of tea. But it is hard to spend an hour with Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky and not begin to care about the fate of ancient civilizations--and the possibility that they offer lessons for today. Far from remaining hidden in the ruins of Bronze Age cities or the pages of academic journals, the findings of archaeology sometimes burst forth on the front page of the Sunday newspaper.

"In Ruin, Symbols on a Stone Hint at a Lost Asian Culture," announced the New York Times on May 13, 2001, a few days before our visit to the Peabody Museum. The discovery of a tiny stone seal, about an inch square, at a site in the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, had prompted a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania and a conference on language and archaeology at Harvard. Dr. Fredrik Hiebert, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist who discovered the seal, and his colleague, Dr. Victor Mair, a Harvard PhD in Chinese antiquities, both declared that the geometric markings on the stone seal were enough to confirm that the similar settlements in Turkmenistan and neighboring Uzbekistan (which specialists call the BMAC, for Bactria-Margiana Archaeology Complex) may be considered a civilization. In addition to sheep and goat herding, irrigation farming of wheat and barley, bronze tools, ceramics, alabaster and bone carving, and jewelry of semiprecious stones, the BMAC (pronounced BEE-mack) had evidently produced the capstone of civilized people: its own writing system.

But Harvard's Lamberg-Karlovsky was not so sure, reported the Times. Were the symbols on the tiny seal isolated pictographs or a specimen of true writing? Professor Heibert's discovery "falls into place with other research showing that this culture was working out some sort of communication system, though it never reached the level of complexity in writing as its neighbors did," Lamberg-Karlovsky told the reporter.

Now we begin to glimpse the personalities and passions that drive the breakthroughs and theories in archaeology--as they do in all the sciences--and thrill Lamberg-Karlovsky's students at Harvard. For all of the authorities cited in the Times story--Lamberg-Karlovsky, Hiebert, Mair, and particularly the Russian archaeologist, Victor Sarianidi of the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow, discoverer of the BMAC--have been friendly collaborators and intellectual rivals for many years. Lamberg-Karlovsky relishes memories of his years of association with the famous Dr. Sarianidi.

"I was born in Czechoslovakia, so my Czech made it possible for me to communicate with Russians in the late '70s and early '80s, when Russian and American archaeologists began to work together. I had met Victor Sarianidi in Iran when he was first discovering the BMAC, and where we were both expelled when the politics there turned ugly. I proposed that we work together on what appeared to be a dramatic new discovery, and a symbiotic relationship developed. The Soviets were very good at uncovering large sites with massive teams of workers, but they had no laboratories to do carbon-14 dating or analyze metals, ceramics, seeds, bones, and animal remains, the things we do best. We would work slowly and excavate small areas, then search, quantify, and analyze. They would excavate very large areas, and we would tease each other with the differences. Victor would say, 'You haven't even seen a building yet!' and I would reply, 'You have a whole building, but you don't even know what the people ate for supper!'"

"Victor Sarianidi was one of the most admirable persons you would ever want to meet--wonderfully open. But there were times when I was very nervous. He dated the BMAC from 1500 to 1000 bc, but our carbon-14 dates started coming in at 2200 to 1900. So when I got the results I waited as long as possible to tell him, person-to-person, because it might greatly upset him, even offend him, as he had already published his findings. So it was a very memorable lunch we had in Moscow. I pushed across the table the 18 or 19 carbon dates that we had from a single building. And he looked at them and started saying, 'My god... My god... My god' in Russian. And then he put the reports down and, with a big smile on his face, said, 'Carl, you have your science, and I have mine. We can agree to disagree.' So he didn't buy it, and he still really doesn't."

"Carl" Lamberg-Karlovsky was born in Prague in 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. When the Nazis came, his uncle fled with Carl and his grandmother, leaving behind his father, a political activist. He was killed in Auschwitz. Carl eventually immigrated to the United States, where his future reputation as an archaeologist would hinge on his theory of the importance of peripheral areas in the evolution of major cultures. "I suspect my attraction to the periphery--to settlements that provide raw materials and products and markets to the center--was a result of the dislocation I experienced as a child," he reflects today. "I have always had a certain sympathy for the disenfranchised, not a philanthropic concern, but a concern as to why and how people can live at the margin. So I discovered that in all the beautiful cities in Mesopotamia, there is no copper there, no lumber there, there's no gold or silver there, no lapis lazuli. All these things came from outside, probably in exchange for surplus grain."

Of the more than 100 studies that Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky has published since earning his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965, many have focused on archaeological areas that others have shunned as being peripheral to the great river-based civilizations of antiquity--Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus. From 1966 to 1975 he directed the excavations at Tepe Yahya in southeastern Iran, which yielded more than two dozen articles and five book-length monographs. From 1976 to 1977, he led the first archaeological survey of the Sultanate of Oman at the invitation of the Omani government, and from 1976 to 1979 he directed a similar survey of Saudi Arabia. Since 1979, Lamberg-Karlovsky has participated in the series of excavations and publication projects associated with the BMAC culture and its far-flung settlements along the ancient Silk Road linking China and the Middle East.

Long before readers of the New York Times were introduced to the magnitude of the BMAC culture and the mysteries of its appearance and disappearance, Harvard Extension School students were privy to the inside story. They had heard of buildings "like huge apartment complexes, each bigger than a football field and divided into dozens and dozens of rooms... surrounded by multiple mud-brick walls, some as much as 10 feet thick." They had heard of the graves in which women were buried with more wealth than men, a remarkable exception to the patriarchal dominance common in the Bronze Age. And they knew that the religious customs and objects found at Anau and other BMAC sites from India to Turkey may well have prefigured the Zoroastrian religion, which influenced Judaism, Mahayana Buddhism, and Christianity centuries later.

Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky's Harvard Extension School students are also familiar with the mysteries their instructor spelled out with characteristic candor for the Times reporter. "What happened remains unclear. The architectural signatures, their fortified buildings, disappear after a few hundred years. Most of the luxury materials disappear. There is a diminution of complexity. Perhaps people revert to smaller settlements, or they leave and are absorbed in other cultures."

But what happened to the BMAC people, and what lessons may we draw from their sudden demise? Lamberg-Karlovsky pleads ignorance, then gladly ticks off the leading theories with exquisite clarity: climatic or environmental catastrophe, invasion by barbarians, or moral-spiritual decline. Each has its pros and cons, its supporters and detractors. Fluctuations in water resources, violent weather, earthquakes, pestilence, and disease can never be ruled out. On the other hand the BMAC and Indus cultures are found over such a vast territory that their complete destruction by any of these factors would most likely have been reflected in the oral and written literatures of the Middle East or India in later times.

Likewise, the possibility of invasion by horse-and-chariot-borne marauders from the north, the Indo-Aryans or Andronovo people, is an attractive theory to many today. Here ancient religious writings, the Zend Avesta and Rig Veda, offer literary evidence of a violent end to the cultures that preceded them. Yet there is no physical evidence of mass destruction of BMAC and Indus Valley cities, such as one finds at Jericho and other Canaanite settlements that were burned to the ground centuries later by invading Hebrews or rebellious peasants.

This leaves the possibility of internal decline, a spiritual or political crisis, a failure of cultural nerve that precipitated a retreat from civilization. Certainly the complex technologies, such as the extraordinary sanitation systems at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, were not replicated in the village societies that followed. What followed, with the simultaneous abandonment of writing, was, in fact, silence--a historical mystery wrapped in a cultural enigma. Such a scenario "has its analogy to the modern-day sentiment that America is falling apart," Lamberg-Karlovsky observes. "Internal corruption, decay, and central forces no longer able to hold together--like the decline of Rome."

But this dark vision is soon banished by the return of Lamberg-Karlovsky's ebullience. Now he is off again, telling about his first field experiences under the eagle eyes of the renowned Kathleen Kenyon. One summer, the new graduate student was planning to study monkey behavior in Africa when the chance to join Kenyon's dig in Jordan opened up. "She was a formidable presence and could be very severe," he recalled. "One morning I was late for the 6 am start to excavation activities. When Kenyon found me, she suggested that I take the day off. 'In fact, why don't you take three days off--I don't want to see you.' 'But what did I do?' 'You were ten minutes late,' Kenyon replied. Of course I admired her greatly from that day on, and we stayed in contact until she died in London in her seventies."

During his 36 years on the Harvard faculty, Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky has directed the Peabody Museum (1977-1991), served as chair of Archaeology (1994-present), supervised more than two dozen doctoral dissertations (including that of Fredrik Hiebert), served on nearly 30 committees, and been appointed as fellow, officer, or member of more than a dozen professional societies.

Among the assignments that Lamberg-Karlovsky fondly recalls were his ten years as a member of the Administrative Board of the Harvard Extension School. "I enjoyed making the rules and regulations for a constituency that is so very different. And after 25 years I still enjoy the students at Extension--particularly the ones who are struggling to continue their education. It's tough for some of them."

"And sometimes they really want to become archaeologists. But I tell them that it's not a profession in which there are many jobs. I like to quietly encourage them to trade stock to make a living. Of course one can be a volunteer on an archaeological dig right here in New England or any number of places--and that's really great--but it doesn't provide you with the carbohydrates necessary to survive!"

Photo by Jeffry Pike.