Spring Landscapes as Persistent Places of Human Occupation: a Multi-disciplinary Approach Investigating the Palaeolithic of Kazakhstan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Stone Age Archaeology of Central Asia" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The first dispersals of Homo sapiens into Asia occurred during the Late Pleistocene (ca. 129,000 – 11,700 years ago) and involved traversing arid regions. Springs are groundwater systems that likely played a vital role in human expansion across arid areas where surface waters, like rivers and lakes, were scarce. Despite this, the general relationship between spring formation and human occupation remains unclear due to the lack of systematic studies on spring landscapes. Kazakhstan is a crucial area for studying spring landscapes, lying at the crossroads of human dispersals in arid Central Asia. Moreover, it has a high tectonic activity that promotes spring formation and a growing number of Palaeolithic sites associated with springs. SPRINGSCAPES is an upcoming Marie-Curie project that explores the possible use of spring sites as persistent places of human settlement in Kazakhstan using an interdisciplinary approach. Grounded on archaeological survey, landscape analysis, and geoarchaeology, SPRINGSCAPES aims to couple landscape evolution with site formation processes. By examining the interplay between hunter-gatherer mobility and water availability, SPRINGSCAPES seeks to contribute to the study of Palaeolithic Central Asia, propose geoarchaeological methods for the analysis of spring sites, and provide long-term insights into the use of groundwater resources in arid regions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Advances in Stone Age Archaeology of Central Asia

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51337