Asia: Central Asia (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Billings.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeobotanical research in Central Asia has expanded greatly in the last two decades, changing much about our understanding of past subsistence strategies and lifeways throughout the broader region. Archaeobotany is a crucial tool for gaining insight into the way that human/plant relationships shape and structure society. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitch Allen. William B. Trousdale.

Our knowledge of the cultural history of western Central Asia is spotty and incomplete between the collapse of complex societies of the Bronze Age and the middle of the first millennium BCE. This is particularly true of the little-studied Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan and eastern Iran. The Helmand Sistan Project, conducted by the Smithsonian Institution and Afghan Directorate of Archaeology and Historic Preservation through the 1970s but hitherto unpublished, uncovered through survey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Sluka.

A pilot study of pile carpet variation and error is carried out on ethnographic Turkmen carpets. No such work has been previously published, and so this analysis provides basic data and conclusions on carpet variation, including type and intensity of variation, to be used as a starting point for further study of archaeologic carpet samples. Data is taken from six comparable carpets, informing on two aspects of carpet variation. The dimensions and knot densities of the carpets’ motifs are used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Chang. Sergey Ivanov. Perry Tourtellotte.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2019 our team has conducted surveys of Bronze Age through Medieval sites in the Jukuu Valley, an intermontane region on the south side of Lake Issyk-Kul. Surveys have uncovered palimpsests of four millennia of land use. Radiometric dating, cultural historical sequences of site types, and mortuary remains have recalibrated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Franklin.

This paper approaches Silk Road-scapes as imagined topographies, a particular inheritance of the medieval culture of travel, and of its representations of the world(s). How we imagine the ‘Silk Road’ landscape is therefore rooted in assumptions about categories and conditions of agency (social and historical), and about space. These include mobility, transcendence, and visibility—both in the landscape and in the record. Travel and cosmopolitan encounters along roads (Silk or otherwise) are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Olson.

After the passage of the Iranian Antiquities Law of 1930, the Gorgan Plain in northeastern Iran was seen as one of the most promising regions in the Old World for archaeological research. Despite decades of pioneering field and laboratory research, northeastern Iran still lacks a regionally integrated ceramic chronology for significant stretches of its archaeological history, particularly the 3rd millennium BCE. While individual sequences from important sites such as Tureng Tepe and Shah Tepe...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asa Cameron. Bukhchuluun Dashzeveg. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Mongolia, communities across the region adopted mobile pastoralism and horse-riding technology. In conjunction with these changes in subsistence and mobility patterns, innovative funerary practices emerged that incorporated monumental construction and new mortuary offerings. Included in these grave...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Taylor. Isaac Hart. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. Tumurbaatar Tuvshinjargal. Nicholas Jarman.

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Around the globe, a rapidly warming climate is exposing organic materials preserved in permanent snow and ice features. In western Mongolia, artifacts melting from ice features in the Altai mountains demonstrate a millennia-long record of the use of high-altitude zones for hunting of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cassandra Apuzzo. Kory Cooper. Elizabeth Brite. Aysulu Iskanderova. Azizkhan Toreniyazov.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Abu Muslim qala is a multi-phase site located west of the Sultanuizdag mountain range in Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan, with an occupation beginning as early as the seventh century AD. Situated along the route connecting two of the region’s most prominent medieval cities, Abu Muslim qala may have played a role in the broader network of medieval metals trade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Merkle. Michael Frachetti.

This is an abstract from the "From Campsite to Capital – Mobility Patterns and Urbanism in Inner Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent discoveries of a series of highland urban sites (located over 2000m elevation) in the Pamir foothills of Uzbekistan inspire a full reconsideration of the political and economic organization of the Qarakhanid Khaganate and their relationship to both lowland and highland cities. The Qarakhanids controlled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti.

New research in the field of aDNA has re-invigorated debates about migrations across Eurasia in prehistory. Emerging data in this field demands that we interrogate how mobility and migration from an ecological and demographic perspective, since these factors influence our interpretation of the still emerging genetic data. In this paper I present the archaeological conditions of the Eurasian steppe ca. 3000-2000 BCE applied to a spatial model with the goal of generating a more complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asa Cameron. Christina Carolus. Bukhchuluun Dashzeveg.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the appearance of monumental traditions in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1000 BC) through the emergence of the Xiongnu state (ca. 250 BC–150 AD), populations of the semiarid Gobi-steppe of Mongolia underwent a series of dramatic transitions. These changing dynamics altered how people interacted with and moved within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabelle Coupal.

This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, the Republic of Georgia has fostered a growing interest for archaeological research in the Southern Caucasus region. This trend has been stimulated both by a strong local contingent of archaeologists, of two generations and of two different systems,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susanne Reichert.

This is an abstract from the "From Campsite to Capital – Mobility Patterns and Urbanism in Inner Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With its sparse population and few forest coverage, Mongolia is ideally suited for a wide array of surveying methods and as a consequence for landscape archaeological approaches. The proposed paper particularly looks into power and authority as expressed within the landscape. Two valleys in Mongolia will be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shujing Wang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper investigates potteries excavated from the Late Iron Age kurgan burials (i.e., burials with an aboveground mound) at the fringes of the Bukhara oasis in present-day central Uzbekistan. Connecting the intensively farmed river oasis and the desert steppe, the border of Bukhara oasis as a frontier zone was also an arena in which complex social and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Berner. Denis Sharapov. Andrei Logvin. Irina Shevnina.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Bronze Age (2100–1400 BCE) of the Ural-Tobol interfluve saw the emergence and decline of proto-urban fortified settlements occupied by pastoralists and metallurgists. These sites have been interpreted as centers for military defense, ritual-political nodes, strategic centers to protect natural resources or avoid...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlene Rosen. Jennifer Farquhar. James Eighmey. Sarantuya Dalantai. Yadmaa Tserendagva.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological surveys in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia have begun to reveal new information about the landscape distribution and seasonal movements of mobile populations in this semi-arid steppe environment on the eve of the late Holocene adoption of pastoralism. However, until recently we’ve had little information about...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karolina Werens. John Pouncett. Christophe Snoeck. Rick Schulting. Andrzej Weber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A new bioavailable strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) baseline was created for the Baikal region, covering c. 1.5 million square kilometres. With an ongoing, extensive archaeological investigation of c. 200 prehistoric cemetery sites in this vast area, there is a need for a reliable isotopic model of environmental strontium variation to contextualise human and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Gardner. Jargalan Burentogtokh.

This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Conversations on ritual practice along the Mongolian steppe are often dominated by discussions of monumental architecture that is typified by large stone mounds referred to as "khirigsuurs" or "Deer Stone" steles. Conversely, the idea that ritual space and practice can be considered at the small-scale household has been mostly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti. Farhad Maksudov.

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery of small to mid-sized cities (Tashbulak and Tugunbulak) built by the Qarakhanids (ninth–twelfth century CE) at high elevation illustrates that urban centers used by nomadic khanates may have operated under a unique model of “modular” urbanism, which we define as a hybridized form of urban development and nomadic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Miller.

Material remains of communities and peoples enmeshed in imperial regimes are most often assessed as representations of incorporation into empires. Yet many of the objects in consideration were not so much passive material declarations as they were tools for active demonstrations. Authority, regional and local, derived from membership in exclusive imperial echelons; membership that required more than mere badges of identity but performances of imperially-derived authority. This paper addresses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Chang. Sergey Ivanov. Perry Tourtellotte.

This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The commodification of aesthetic traditions in the Eurasian steppe world may be explored as a method for tracing the economic and political spheres of the larger Eurasian World System in the first millennium BCE. This paper will address the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Parrish. Jean-Luc Houle. Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan. Matthew Fuka.

The archaeology of the Xiongnu period has grown considerably over the last decade, yet debate still surrounds Xiongnu subsistence practices and the timing for the rise, expansion, and ‘collapse’ of the Xiongnu polity. The problem, in part, has to do with discrepancies between dates that come from the same sites. Some dates have been reported to be earlier when the samples came from human remains. These discrepancies have been attributed to the ‘reservoir effect’. In order to investigate this, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti.

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Theories of “complex social organization” have long linked institutional formations to increased concentrations of power, centralization, and inequality. However, for more than a decade, novel models of “non-uniform complexity”—wherein economic, social, ritual, and practical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Makarewicz. Iain Kendall.

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The initial spread of pastoralism into the Mongolian steppe during the third millennium cal BC marked a major transformation in human subsistence. Dairying was practiced by early pastoralist groups, evidenced by the identification of milk proteins preserved in human dental calculus. However, we have a poor understanding of how the focused...