text: Kuftin was invited to Central Asia to carry out explorations in 1949. He first reconnoitered Turkmenistan and selected a very large tepe (hill), the Altyndepe (in Turkmen language meaning: the "Golden Hill" ). This tepe overlooks the Tedzen delta at the foot of Kopetdag. He found a Neolithic settlement extending into Bronze Age in southern Turkmenistan near the village of Miana, a settlement of 25 ha area with a total stratification thickness of  with an  strip of human habitation. This excavated tepe turned out to be a large settlement,  in length and  in width, and was identified as a major Bronze Age town. From the highest point of this tepe, a trench was dug to a depth of  and the section was logged, which revealed layers of the Bronze Age, of neolithic and Eneolithic periods. Ceramics collected from the different layers of the trench enabled Kuftin to establish the sequence and chronology of the findings. One year after he started sequencing the site, he died suddenly and was replaced by Vadim Mikhailovich Masson who published a book on the Bronze Age sequence of this site. The settlement of Ilgynly had also shifted to Altyndepe. Early Bronze period fort walls with decorated towers and a huge entrance had encircled this settlement, though when found, they were in ruins. Discoveries by Soviet archeologists dated the finds at this place, in a chronological order, to the later half of the third millennium BC. Altyn-Depe also provided a link to the several Bronze Age cultures of Eurasia.
  The most notable findings in the burial ground of the elite, located in the outskirts of Altyndepe, were "a disk-like stone weight, a miniature column, more than 1500 beads, a steatite plate with an image of cross and half-moon, a moulded clay wolf, as well as a golden head of a bull with a turquoise sickle inlaid in the forehead".
  Excavations revealed bone and copper artifacts of the fifth millennium BC (Neolithic period), female figurines painted with ornaments, and necklaces of the fourth million BC.
  Brick walls of  thickness with brick kilns and a hearth in the middle of the house dated to early third millennium, and small temple buildings and rectangular hearths of Namazga V type of the middle third millennium were also found.
  In the period from late third millennium to early second millennium, the antiquaries revealed an urban habitation with artisans' houses. Also unearthed were 62 double-tiered kilns, beads and seals.
  Four stepped ziggurats were found. Further were revealed female terracotta figurines with plaited hair, stone vessels, hafted bronze and copper daggers with flat blades, tabbed silver and bronze seals.
  The further findings were,
  * Paintings of animals such as goats, eagles, and panthers.
  * Three headed composite animal.
  * A priest's tomb with gold heads of a wolf and a bull.
  * Other tombs with silver ornaments, precious stones and seals. 
  *One quarter of a ‘nobility’ seal with two signs in Indus script conjectured to be that of Bronze Age settlers in Altyndepe. 
  However, the settlement gradually disappeared (it was deserted around 1600 BC) as a result of climatic changes; people migrated to the Mugrab region, another area of South Uzbekistan (Sapali), and Northern Afghanistan (Dashli). Further, these findings confirmed the Middle Asian interaction from the north to the Oxus civilization.