Landscape Archaeology in the Juuku Valley on the South Side of Lake Issyk-Kul

Summary

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 the time-space systematics of this locality within the larger regional sequences. During the Wusun period of the Iron Age (late first millennium BCE/early first millennium CE) preliminary archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological evidence demonstrate a dual economy based on the herding of sheep, goats, cattle, and horses and the cultivation of barley, wheat, and the two millets at 1,600 and 2,100 m asl. Chinese historical sources document the central location of the Wusun state in the southern valleys of Lake Issyk-Kul. Preliminary GIS studies show a limited degree of co-location between the Saka and Wusun burial fields. Was there a politico-religious boundary between the earlier Saka nomadic confederacy and the later Wusun nomadic state? In 2022 we excavated a Wusun kurgan and a Wusun settlement to test our hypothesis on core-periphery relations. Our project also presents a new paradigm for decolonizing international field research in Central Asia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35583.0