An international team of scholars has launched a three-way collaborative project in Uzbekistan's high mountain regions to shed new light on the economic, social, cultural, and political dimensions of Turkic communities that thrived across Central Asia from the 6th to the 11th centuries.
Building on a groundbreaking LiDAR scanning project recently published in Nature, directed by Michael Frachetti (Washington University in St. Louis) and Farhad Maksudov (Institute of Archaeology of Uzbekistan, Academy of Sciences, Tashkent Department), which revealed the vast scale of highland urbanism at the site of Tugunbulak and challenged traditional divisions between settled agricultural societies and mobile pastoralist cultures, this partnership expanded in 2023 to include a team from UC Berkeley led by Sanjyot Mehendale (Tang Center for Silk Road Studies/Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures).
The Silk Road – High-elevation Urbanism (SR-HUBS) project will investigate the everyday life of Tugunbulak’s high-altitude communities and their interregional connections with contemporaneous sites across Central Eurasia, including the Sogdian-dominated lowlands to the south. Often perceived as remote and associated with “less-developed” mobile pastoral groups, these highland areas offer rich but underexplored evidence of active exchanges. The project has a unique opportunity to trace how these networks operated across diverse landscapes, revealing the significant role of highland communities in fostering regional and broader connections beyond the sedentary oases that have typically dominated Silk Road studies. Early excavations at the site suggest that access to metal ores may have fueled a vibrant urban economy well-integrated into these networks.
In the coming years, researchers will conduct extensive fieldwork at the site and its environs to map patterns of urbanization and reconstruct aspects of the local economy, religious practices, and socio-political alliances. By broadening the scope beyond the traditional focus of scholarship on Turkic military and political power, the SR-HUBS project aims to highlight the complex economic, cultural, and social dynamics of these regions, viewing the lowlands from the highlands’ perspective rather than the reverse.
Additional Links:
https://www.science.org/content/article/medieval-silk-road-metropolis-unearthed-uzbek-mountains
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c238kv8ddeyo
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