theory of the three-age system and, as importantly, showing that archaeologists could use environmental changes to help them understand social, technological, and cultural changes. Steenstrup, archaeologist jens jacob worsaae, and geologist J. Forchammer were members of the kitchenmidden committee that excavated mounds of shells found in Denmark to ascertain their origin and, subsequently, contributed to the knowledge of the Mesolithic period in northern Europe.

Tim Murray

See also

European Mesolithic; Shell Midden Analysis

References

Klindt-Jensen, O. 1975. A History of Scandinavian Archaeology. London: Thames and Hudson.

Stein, Sir (Mark) Aurel

(1862–1943)

Aurel Stein was born in Budapest. Educated there and in Dresden, Germany, and at the universities of Vienna and Leipzig, he received his Ph.D. in 1883 from the University of Tübingen, where he studied Persian and Indian archaeology. Between 1884 and 1887, he studied classical and oriental archaeology and languages at Oxford University and the British Museum, where he met, and was greatly influenced by, sir henry rawlinson.

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Sir Aurel Stein

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In 1888, Stein traveled to India to become the principal of the Oriental College at Lahore and registrar for the Punjab University. For the next ten years he spent his vacations on antiquarian and geographical research in Kashmir in northern India and on the North-West Frontier (now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan) and his spare time learning and translating Sanskrit. He became well connected with the civil and vice-regal establishment of British colonial India.

In 1900, with the support from Lord Curzon (the viceroy of India) and the Survey of India, Stein led his first expedition into central Asia, where he was to lead three more in 1906–1908, 1913–1916, and 1930. He took different routes each time to and from Turkistan, surveying, exploring, mapping, and excavating as he went. He traveled huge distances and brought back to India and England thousands of artifacts and, it is rumored, intelligence information for the British government. He became a naturalized British subject in 1904, and between 1910 and 1929 was directly employed by the Archaeological Survey of India. He was knighted in 1912. Stein’s achievements were substantial—here was a whole area of the world that was unknown archaeologically, and its history was little known as well. Stein filled in this huge gap.

On his first expedition he explored the southern oases of the Taklamakan Desert, and at settlements in the Khotan region he discovered numerous documents in ancient Tibetan, Chinese, and Kharoshti. On the second expedition, he explored the dried-up Lop Sea bed and traced the long-used caravan route between china and the West by following the trail of Neolithic implements, metal objects, beads, and ancient Han coins. He visited the watchtowers of the ancient Chinese frontier, and at the site of Miran in what is now Chinese Central Asia, which had been abandoned in the third century b.c., he found wall paintings of classical design. Stein’s greatest find was not only the fabulous “Cave of the Thousand Buddhas” but the large