Report from the 2015 Archaeological Survey in Bukhara, Uzbekistan

During the 2015 field season in Bukhara, Uzbekistan the ISAW team, comprising of Prof. Sören Stark and ISAW students Shujing Wang and Lorenzo Castellano, conducted in collaboration with colleagues at NYU Abu Dhabi, the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, and the Russian Academy of Sciences (Siberian Branch) a first intensive and extensive archaeological survey as pilot of a new field project in the region. This new project aimed at a detailed investigation of subsistence dynamics of agro-pastoral groups at the fringes of the oasis of Bukhara during Antiquity (roughly from the first half of the first millennium BCE to the first half of the first millennium CE). The study area is ecologically situated in what seem to have been extensive stretches of marshlands between the oasis of a river delta and the desert-steppes of Western Central Asia. 

During the course of our work we registered more than 200 new sites (most of them remains of open settlements), from which we systematically collected diagnostic ceramic assemblages. These will form the basis of a first systematic study of Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic ceramics in the region. Most remarkable among the sites studied during our extensive survey are the remains of ancient fields with their irrigation canals — apparently dating not later than the 4th century CE (judging from the date of the surrounding settlements), as well as a very well preserved Caravanserai on the main route between Bukhara and the region of Khwarezm (south of Lake Aral), dating to the late Samanid and Qarakhanid periods (late 10th to 12th/early13th centuries).