A research team from the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences has utilized lidar technology to map an area that has revealed the existence of two medieval cities.
Hidden within the towering mountains of Central Asia, along a route known as the Silk Road, archaeologists are uncovering two medieval cities that may have once bustled with inhabitants a thousand years ago.
Lidar image of Tugunbulak, the site of a medieval city in Uzbekistan. (Photo: SAIElab/J. Berner/M. Frachetti).
In 2011, a research team first discovered one of these forgotten cities while climbing in eastern Uzbekistan in search of untold historical narratives.
The archaeologists trekked along a riverbed and stumbled upon burial sites on their way up one of the mountains. Upon reaching the summit, they encountered a plateau adorned with strange mounds. To the untrained eye, these mounds might seem unremarkable. However, “as archaeologists, we recognized that these were man-made structures where people once lived,” shared Farhod Maksudov from the National Archaeological Center of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences.
The ground was also littered with thousands of pottery shards. “We were astonished,” stated Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He and Maksudov were searching for archaeological evidence of nomadic cultures that herded livestock in the mountain pastures. They were not expecting to find a sprawling medieval city covering 12.1 hectares in a relatively harsh climate at an elevation of approximately 2,133.6 meters above sea level. This site is known as Tashbulak, named after the current name of the area.
A second site discovered in 2015, named Tugunbulak, was announced on October 23 in the journal Nature. Researchers employed remote sensing technology to map what they describe as a vast medieval city, nearly 121.4 hectares, located 4.8 kilometers from Tashbulak and connected to the network of trade routes known as the Silk Road.
To gain a detailed view of the terrain, Frachetti and Maksudov equipped a drone with remote sensing technology called lidar (Light Detection and Ranging). The lidar scanner uses laser pulses to map the features of the land beneath it. This technology has increasingly been used in archaeology, having helped uncover a forgotten Maya city lying beneath the tropical canopy in Guatemala over the past few years.
At Tashbulak and Tugunbulak, the result is a topographic map of the sites with detail down to the inch. With the aid of computer algorithms, manual tracking, and excavation, the researchers mapped delicate slopes that could potentially be walls and other buried structures.
