Lost Silk Road cities rediscovered in mountainous Uzbekistan

Archaeologists have discovered two lost Silk Road cities in Uzbekistan, in a finding that could forever change our understanding of the ancient trade route and its itinerant populations.

High altitude settlements

Lidar technology, a powerful laser-based surveying method that can detect structures and their remnants even beneath dense vegetation, was deployed by the researchers on drones above the rugged mountainous terrain. Documented in Nature journal, their findings revealed the extent of two mountain cities located at over 2000 metres altitude in the southeast of the country. That altitude has intrigued the team, who note that temperatures at that elevation would have been so cold that they are only borne by 3% of the people on Earth even with today’s mod cons.

Just three kilometres apart, the two cities existed at the same time, between the 6^th and 11^th centuries CE. Both are “large, fortified and planned cities at high elevation, which is still a rare occurrence but is much more exceptional in ancient times,” the archaeologists said.

Industry and ideology

The bigger settlement, Tugunbulak, occupies around 300 acres and is estimated to have had a population in the tens of thousands. It would have been one of the largest cities around in the region in its day – large enough to require five watchtowers and a central fortress. Signs of industry have also been unearthed, with a number of kilns and furnaces giving the team reason to think that the city could have been a centre of iron or steel production.

Nearby Tashbulak is believed to have been smaller, only 30 acres, with a few thousand inhabitants, yet it contains the vestiges of a cemetery “mismatched to the small size of the town. There’s definitely something ideologically oriented around Tashbulak that has people being buried there,” research lead Michael Frachetti said. The settlement also showed some of the earliest signs of Muslim burials in the region.

“This changes everything”

The industrial clues and size of the burial grounds have been enough to give the researchers pause about traditional thinking on the Silk Road, dominated by the idea of Samarkand as a “breadbasket” and of “primitive” tribal rituals.

“These people weren’t the barbarian horse-riding hordes that history has often painted them as. They were mountain populations, probably with nomadic political systems, but they were also investing in major urban infrastructure. This changes everything we thought we knew about Central Asian history,” Frachetti said.