Laser beam reveals forgotten city on the Silk Road

Nestled in the towering mountains of Central Asia, along the so-called Silk Road, archaeologists are discovering two medieval cities that may have once bustled with people living miles apart. here a thousand years.

In 2011, a research team first discovered one of these forgotten cities while climbing mountains in eastern Uzbekistan in search of untold historical stories.

Archaeologists walked along the riverbed and discovered burial sites on their way to the top of one of the mountains. When they arrived, a plateau with strange mounds spread out before them. To the untrained eye, these mounds may not look like anything special. But “as archaeologists, we recognize these as human-made places, as human-inhabited places,” said Farhod Maksudov of the National Center of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan. share.

The ground is also littered with thousands of ceramic pieces. “We were amazed,” said Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, said. He and Maksudov looked for archaeological evidence of nomadic cultures that grazed livestock on mountain meadows. Researchers did not expect to find a 12.1-hectare medieval city in a relatively harsh climate at an altitude of about 2,133.6 m above sea level. The site was called Tashbulak, after the area’s current name.

The second site discovered in 2015, named Tugunbulak, was announced on October 23 in the journal Nature. The researchers used remote sensing technology to map what they describe as a large medieval city, nearly 121.4 hectares, 4.8 kilometers from Tashbulak and connected to a network of The trade route was known as the Silk Road.

To get a detailed view of the land, Frachetti and Maksudov equipped a drone with remote sensing technology called lidar. Lidar scanners use laser pulses to map features of the land below. This technology has been increasingly used in archeology – over the past few years it has helped uncover a forgotten Maya city sprawling beneath the canopy of a rainforest in Guatemala.

At Tashbulak and Tugunbulak, the result is a topographic map of the sites with inch-level detail. With the help of computer algorithms, manual tracking and excavation, researchers have mapped delicate slopes that were likely city walls and other buried structures.