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Surprisingly high-altitude Silk Road city mapped from the sky

The lidar method for aerial archaeology identifies human-modified landscapes. Detection of a massive urban settlement on a mountainous Uzbekistan site challenges preconceptions about medieval urbanization high in Central Asia.
  1. Zachary W. Silvia

    1. Zachary W. Silvia is at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA.

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Ancient mountain-top cities typically bring to mind sites such as Machu Picchu, located 2,430 metres above sea level in the Peruvian Andes. High-altitude urban sites are extraordinarily rare in the archaeological record because of a unique set of landscape challenges and technological demands that must be overcome for people to form large communities in mountainous areas. For much of human history, areas of dense population have mainly formed in low-lying areas that are usually along rivers or coasts. Writing in Nature, Frachetti et al.1 help to re-evaluate our understanding of upland urbanization by using drones for an aerial technique called lidar to assess signs of human-generated structures in a mountainous region. This work was conducted at a site in Uzbekistan, right at the heart of the medieval network of trade and exchange known as the Silk Roads and it is the first archaeological lidar survey conducted in Central Asia.

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Nature 634, 1056-1058 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03315-3

References

  1. Frachetti, M. D. et al. Nature 634, 1118–1124 (2024).

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  2. Maksudov, F. et al. In Proc. 1st International Congress on Central Asian Archaeology (eds Baumer, C. & Novák, M.) 283–305 (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019).

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  3. Tremblay, J. C. & Ainslie, P. N. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 118, e2102463118 (2021).

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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