Central Asian archaeology excavates the oasis cities and cave complexes strung along the Silk Road through the Taklamakan Desert and the Tarim Basin, recovering manuscripts, wall paintings and artifacts from a region whose surviving textual record is otherwise thin and scattered across many languages. The Hungarian born British archaeologist Aurel Stein opened the field with his first Central Asian expedition, 1900 to 1901, which reached Dandan Oilik and other sites in the Khotan oasis region. His second Central Asian expedition, 1906 to 1908, reached Dunhuang in 1907 and recovered the sealed manuscript cache at the Mogao Caves, thousands of Buddhist, Manichaean and other religious texts and artworks that had lain undisturbed for centuries.
The oasis cities Stein and later expeditions uncovered were meeting points where Buddhism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism and Nestorian Christianity coexisted and influenced one another along the same trade routes, a religious mixture the excavated material documents directly in multiple languages and scripts. The atlas draws on Central Asian archaeology wherever a claim concerns the spread of a religion along the Silk Road or contact between traditions that met in these oasis cities, since the excavated manuscripts are frequently the only surviving record of communities whose own histories were not otherwise preserved.