India
Sir Charles Wilkins (1749-1836) trained as a printer and in 1770 he went to India to work as a printer and writer for the East India Company (est.1600). His facility with language allowed him to quickly learn Persian, Bengali and Sanskrit. In 1785 he published his translation of Bhagavad Gita. His epigraphic readings led to the discovery of the Maukhari (6th-7th century) and Pala (8th-12th century) dynasties.
In 1819 James Prinsep (1799-1840) was given an appointment in the Calcutta mint, where he eventually became assay master. Apart from architectural work, his leisure was devoted to Indian inscriptions and numismatics. He appealed for ancient coins and inscriptions and got a large response. He was able to interpret Bactrian and Kushan coins, but his crowning achievement was the decipherment of the Brahmi script and the consequent clearing up the many mysteries of ancient Indian history, in particular that of Asoka (72; r.268-232 BC), emperor of the Maurya Dynasty (322-187 BC).
As the East India Company assumed greater responsibilities for Indian territories, records began to be made in the form of measured drawings. In 1849 James Fergusson (1808-86) embarked on an architectural survey and his History of Indian and Eastern Architecture was published in 1876. Fergusson joined with James Burgess (1832-1916) to make studies of monuments and their Cave Temples of India was published in 1880. A contemporary of Fergusson was General Sir Alexander Cunningham (1814-1893) who was director (1861*85) of the Archaeological Survey of India (est.1861) and wrote an Ancient Geography of India (1871).
Sir John Hubert Marshall (1876-1958) was the director (1902-28) the Archaeological Survey of India and, although his interests lay with Taxila and the Greeks in the far north of India, he was responsible for the excavation that led to the discovery of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, two of the main cities of the Indus Valley civilisation (c.3300-c.1300 BC).
Sir Mark Aurel Stein (1862-1943), superintendent (1910-1917) of the archaeology in the Northwest Frontier province, led four major expeditions (1900, 1906-8, 1913-16 and 1930) to trace ancient caravan routes between western China and the West, concentrating on the little known region of eastern Turkistan, and did extensive research on the movements of Alexander the Great through Asia.
Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler (1890-1976), director (1944-48) of the Archaeological Survey of India, introduced his scientific and stratigraphic methods to the subcontinent and excavated at Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Arikamedu.
China
In 1916 Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874-1960) was invited to China as a mining adviser to the Chinese government. In 1921 he discovered the Neolithic settlement site in Yangshao village in Henan province. In 1921 he also identified pieces of quartz found at Choukoutien, a cave system near Beijing, as not being local to the area. Realising that they may have been used as tools by prehistoric man he set Otto Zdansky (1894-1988) to work excavating. Eventually in 1926 Andersson announced the discovery of two human teeth, later identified as being the first finds of Homo erectus, dubbed Peking Man.
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