During the 1920s, the American Museum of Natural History in New York conducted a series of field expeditions to Mongolia under the direction of Roy Chapman Andrews, a celebrated explorer of the day. Members of the multi-disciplinary teams that formed the 1925 and 1928 expeditions investigated prehistoric remains they encountered during the field research. These investigations, which remain unpublished, are still important clues to man's movement between Siberia and China. They also demonstrate hunting-gathering life in this remote region at the close of the Pleistocene era.

The political upheavals in the area and the inability of Westerners to gain access or to continue work in the Gobi have prevented any real field research in the decades since World War II. Fairservis' book, with its description and analysis of the archaeological side of the Andrews expeditions, is both unique and invaluable to anyone concerned with the ancient influences which affected the early cultures of Siberia and China. The archaeological finds involve a substantive stratigraphy the first of its kind for the Gobi region and a survey of historical remains which bear upon the character of the "barbarian" tribes that besieged the Great Wall of China.