In the late nineteenth century, Lieutenant Ole Olufsen set out from Denmark as the leader of two successive expeditions to Tsarist Central Asia. He and his companions traveled from the Caspian Sea to the mountainous Pamirs near the border of China and British India, collecting information on the culture and way of life of the people who lived there, including the Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Tajik, Uzbek, and Wakhan. Nomads of the Pamir Plateau deals scientifically with the material that these explorers brought home: their detailed diaries, reports, letters, and the magnificent collection of objects they collected for the Department of Ethnography at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen.