Mortuary Practices, Production and Exchanges in the Borderland: A Case Study from the Bukhara Oasis (Uzbekistan)

Summary

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 economic interactions between pastoral and agricultural populations took place. The rich funerary ensemble located at this borderland includes more than 1000 kurgan burials, the major burial goods from which are wheel-made potteries. Combining a scrutiny of the burial contexts, especially the related mortuary practices, the chronological and the pXRF-based compositional analyses of these potteries, this paper seeks to explore the regional production, exchanges, consumptions and local cultural sequence in the Bukhara region. Through this examination, this paper aims to bring the discussion of mobile pastoralists away from models of mass migration and long-distance exchange but to emphasize their interaction and integration with local agricultural communities in the borderland of the oasis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25657