A sophisticated Bronze Age settlement in Kazakhstan could change the way humans think about ancient steppe societies, archaeologists working on the site have said in a new report. Semiyarka, sometimes called the “City of Seven Ravines,” is now thought by researchers to have been an organised “urban hub.”
First found in the early 2000s but not surveyed until 2018, Semiyarka in northeastern Kazakhstan occupies a strategic position above the Irtysh River overlooking seven valleys. It has now revealed itself to be more than triple the size it was initially thought at around 350 hectares, and is “one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries in this region for decades,” according to lead author and University College archaeologist, Miljana Radivojević.
In a statement, Radivojević said: “Semiyarka changes the way we think about steppe societies. It shows that mobile communities could build and sustain permanent, organized settlements centred on a likely large-scale industry—a true ’urban hub’ of the steppe.” The vestiges comprise evidence of a structured layout of domestic dwellings, a larger, possibly institutional building, pottery, and what is believed to be a tin bronze production site.
Occupied from about 1600 BCE, the site “represents a unique settlement with planned architecture,” the research, published in Antiquity, says. The large scale of the earthwork structures and their detail were confirmed by magnetometry, which gave the team the confidence to “describe Semiyarka as a formally planned settlement rather than a loose cluster of occupations,” Radivojević explained.
However, not all commentators agree that Semiyarka can be classed as a city. Speaking to CNN, James Johnson, an archaeologist and assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, said other clues on the site report, such as “the low-density pottery sherd scatter on the surface and seemingly equally low-density evidence for metallurgy,” seem to cast doubt on the “city” claim.
But the study’s co-author, Dan Lawrence, an archaeologist at Durham University, defends calling Semiyarka a city, pointing out “it is very different from surrounding settlements.” Lawrence calls the site “super interesting because it just breaks from all the things that we thought we knew about Central Asia up to this point,” Lawrence says. “And so understanding how that got there, why that got there, and then how it connects to these much larger stories is really interesting, and it’s not something we can answer yet, but now we know the site’s there, we can start to develop a program to try and understand what it all means.”
