Domoko
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Domoko is a ruined village site[1] (known as Old Domoko) located in the eastern region of the Khotan oasis in China, about 20 kilometers north the Domoko administrative center,[2] on the southern arm of the Silk Road. The site is located in the Xinjiang autonomous region.
The village was abandoned in the middle of the 19th century because the shortage of water-supply and the consequently shift of cultivation, according to the local villagers.
Domoko was explored by Sir Aurel Stein in 1906 on his first Central Asia expedition.[3] Stein found an abandoned village and described the archaeological remains and conservation conditions of the buildings:
Here we had reached the southern edge of 'old Domoko', an area covered with the remains of a deserted village group. The crumbling ruins of mud-built dwellings, constructed and arranged exactly as in the now inhabited villages of this tract and forming detached groups, seemed to extend, together with the interspersed orchards, cemeteries and fields, for about three miles from east to west. Going towards the north-west we kept between them for nearly three miles. The mud-walls, strengthened by the insertion of vertical bundles of Kumush, still rose often 4 to 5 ft. above the ground, and the massive fireplaces were intact even to a greater height […] The deserted homesteads had been stripped of all materials that could be of use, such as beams, wooden doorposts, &c. As scarcely any sand had accumulated about the crumbling ruins, their rapid and complete disappearance seemed inevitable as soon as erosion set in.[4]
— Aurel Stein, Ancient Khotan: Vol. I p. 458
Excavations were apparently "rushed" as Stein was keen to return to Niya, a site where he was carrying out more thorough excavations.[3]