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Two Lost Cities Discovered Along the Silk Road Alters What We Know About the Iconic Ancient Trade Route
It's amazing how much new information we're getting from Lidar.
Can't wait for the next cool discovery that Lidar is going to give us.
A pair of lost cities in the highlands of Uzbekistan recently found by archaeologists using lidar demonstrate that the bounty of the Silk Road trade was so lucrative, it allowed urban populations to flourish without agriculture to support them.
Tugunbulak and Tashbulak were two mountain settlements that flourished between the 8th and 11th centuries CE nominally under the control of a Turkic state known as the Qarakhanids that held influence over a slice of Central Asia spanning from the Aral Sea to the Taklamakan Desert.
Along with his colleagues, Michael Frachetti, lead author of the paper on the discovery and lead excavator on the sites since 2011, carried out the first lidar survey in the history of Central Asian archaeology to make the discovery. Lidar stands for Light Detection And Ranging and uses laser-based technology to map landscapes from the air.
It’s one of the most consequential technological innovations in the history of archaeology and has been used all throughout the world to find evidence of past habitation where today only nature remains.
Typically, lidar is used when trees block the view of any eyes looking down upon a landscape, but archaeologists speaking with Science remarked with astonishment how nuanced the lidar survey’s topographical readings were, and how much more they revealed compared to looking down from above on what is essentially an open field.
Tugunbulak occupies approximately 120 hectares (1.2 sq. kilometers) and shows evidence of over 300 unique structures, which vary in size from 30 to 4,300 sq. meters. More specifically, the researchers identified watchtowers connected with walls along a ridge line, evidence of terracing, and a central fortress surrounded by walls made of stone and mudbrick.
Tashbulak, meanwhile, occupies 12–15 hectares (0.12–0.15 km2). Frachetti and colleagues note that even the smaller city follows urban planning similar to concurrent cities in medieval Central Asia, namely it includes a central citadel made of an elevated mound surrounded by dense architecture and walled fortifications. They suggest that there are at least 98 visible habitations, which share a similar shape and size to those in Tugunbulak, and hypothesize that both cities were built to exploit the surrounding mountain terrain for defense as well as the abundant ores and pastures the highland region provides.
Both sites sit at or above 6,000 feet (2,000 meters) above sea level. Even today with all of humanity’s power to move and shape the landscape, only 3% of the global population dwells at that elevation or higher.
“High-altitude urban sites are extraordinarily rare in the archaeological record because of a unique set of landscape challenges and technological demands that must be overcome for people to form large communities in mountainous areas,” writes Zachary W. Silvia, a professor at Brown University’s the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Tugunbulak and Tashbulak were two mountain settlements that flourished between the 8th and 11th centuries CE nominally under the control of a Turkic state known as the Qarakhanids that held influence over a slice of Central Asia spanning from the Aral Sea to the Taklamakan Desert.
Along with his colleagues, Michael Frachetti, lead author of the paper on the discovery and lead excavator on the sites since 2011, carried out the first lidar survey in the history of Central Asian archaeology to make the discovery. Lidar stands for Light Detection And Ranging and uses laser-based technology to map landscapes from the air.
It’s one of the most consequential technological innovations in the history of archaeology and has been used all throughout the world to find evidence of past habitation where today only nature remains.
Typically, lidar is used when trees block the view of any eyes looking down upon a landscape, but archaeologists speaking with Science remarked with astonishment how nuanced the lidar survey’s topographical readings were, and how much more they revealed compared to looking down from above on what is essentially an open field.
Tugunbulak occupies approximately 120 hectares (1.2 sq. kilometers) and shows evidence of over 300 unique structures, which vary in size from 30 to 4,300 sq. meters. More specifically, the researchers identified watchtowers connected with walls along a ridge line, evidence of terracing, and a central fortress surrounded by walls made of stone and mudbrick.
Tashbulak, meanwhile, occupies 12–15 hectares (0.12–0.15 km2). Frachetti and colleagues note that even the smaller city follows urban planning similar to concurrent cities in medieval Central Asia, namely it includes a central citadel made of an elevated mound surrounded by dense architecture and walled fortifications. They suggest that there are at least 98 visible habitations, which share a similar shape and size to those in Tugunbulak, and hypothesize that both cities were built to exploit the surrounding mountain terrain for defense as well as the abundant ores and pastures the highland region provides.
Both sites sit at or above 6,000 feet (2,000 meters) above sea level. Even today with all of humanity’s power to move and shape the landscape, only 3% of the global population dwells at that elevation or higher.
“High-altitude urban sites are extraordinarily rare in the archaeological record because of a unique set of landscape challenges and technological demands that must be overcome for people to form large communities in mountainous areas,” writes Zachary W. Silvia, a professor at Brown University’s the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Can't wait for the next cool discovery that Lidar is going to give us.
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