> To get a detailed lay of the land, Frachetti and Maksudov equipped a drone with remote-sensing technology called lidar (light detection and ranging). Drones are tightly regulated in Uzbekistan, but the researchers managed to get the necessary permits to fly one at the site. A lidar scanner uses laser pulses to map the features of land below. The technology has been increasingly used in archaeology—in the past few years it has helped uncover a lost Maya city sprawling beneath the rainforest canopy in Guatemala.
> This method has its limitations, Silvia says—namely, it often turns up false positives. It’s also impossible to confirm which features come from which time period without more excavation.
Despite the limitations, it's still great that this technology is making inroads in archaeology. Would be interested to see this put to work in the Sahara and other mostly unexplored/unexcavated areas. Seems to be a low-cost but potentially high-reward project.
It's only low cost by comparison to excavation, which is extraordinarily expensive. Good lidars would consume a considerable portion of the equipment budget for a field team. Back when I did this stuff, my budgets for a field season were less than a week's worth of my tech job salary.
One time I dragged a fixed wing out to the middle of Central Asia to do some aerial surveys. It went up, caught in some wind, and immediately dropped into a river never to be seen again. That one hurt.
History is so fascinating. You read about outlandish locations, cultures, peoples as you would in a fantasy
novel, then you realise it actually existed.
Yes, I'm not an expert I only went through a standard American education process. Considering that most people I know think of the Greeks as the begin gin of culture if they give it any thought at all. I would expect a truly thought comment to have some sort of interesting reference to help the ill informed to better understand the world.
That's not quite correct. There are two major issues with the term "silk road".
1. It implies a singular road connecting end to end, when the reality is that there's was a vast network of routes across both land and sea.
2. It implies that the routes existed primarily to transport silk. They carried a lot of things and silk probably wasn't the original or most significant good transported.
The article discusses both of these aspects, albeit imperfectly.
It was more a mesh of overland routes that connected western China to Iranian highlands, steppe routes and from there over to the Black sea and Mesopotamia. This was not a direct trade route but rather a series of interconnections. Intensity probably varied a lot over time as well.
The idea of a very lucrative direct connection between China and the Mediterranean is bunk, but the connectivity, people and goods movement was there for a long, long time, on and off.
Contesting the name based on silk not necessarily being the main cause for people to travel that way feels needlessly obtuse, exactly the kind of minor point scoring some people love when no one else cares.
...many of the most important routes of Eurasian exchange transected some of the highest mountain ranges in the world; however, limited archaeological investigation has been undertaken outside the major urban centers at lower elevations. Furthermore, there is still little scientific inquiry into what goods were actually moving along the historical trade routes. We use archaeobotanical data to study what crops were actually consumed at these medieval towns and compare the data to other sites in order to explore the spread of domesticated plants across the ancient world. We suggest that orchards and vineyards around the oasis cities of Central Asia, such as Bukhara, Khiva, Loulan, and Samarkand, provided cultivated goods for merchants and travelers, who in turn carried those fruits and grains along a nodal network and ultimately across two continents. In this article, we synthesize medieval-period botanical data and present a systematic study of botanical remains recovered from anthropogenic sediments from Tashbulak, Uzbekistan (A.D. 800–1100). We also suggest that most of the fruit crops identified in this archaeobotanical assemblage were carried to the site by merchants from lower elevations, based on the fact that many of these trees cannot grow at high elevations. By pulling together these diverse data sets and contrasting them with historical sources, we argue that arboreal crops were a prominent part of the economy across Central Asia during this period and that certain crops dispersed across Eurasia through Central Asia.
> To get a detailed lay of the land, Frachetti and Maksudov equipped a drone with remote-sensing technology called lidar (light detection and ranging).
Anyone have more details on what kind of a lidar is this?
> Metallurgy may be a key part of how the city could sustain itself at such a high altitude. The mountains are rich in iron ore and have dense juniper forests, which could be burned to fuel the smelting process. The researchers have also uncovered coins from across modern-day Uzbekistan, Maksudov says, suggesting the city may have been a hub for trade. It doesn’t appear to have been strictly a mining settlement, either—at Tashbulak, a cemetery contains the remains of women, elderly people and infants.
>
> “We have realized that this was a large urban center, which was integrated into the Silk Road network and dragged the Silk Road caravans toward mountains ... because they had their own products to offer,” Maksudov says.
Checking, did anyone else get to this part of the article and think "Yes, this shall be my anthropological model for dwarves in my D&D game"?
No, but my thought that this represents and industrial center and it would be great to trace the iron to artifacts around the world.
I also thought that the medieval site could be built on an earlier development. I wonder how many years of production creates such a city. The city may have evolved slowly or was established all at once with the proximity to Juniper trees to iron ore.
Finally I wonder at human powered rates of deforestation how long the juniper trees could last or maybe they were cultivated.
It's possible that most of their production stayed in the Stans region (given all the marauding hordes afoot at the time). So maybe they were a mountainous sink for the trades, not so much a source. (Until they themselves were over-run?)
> To get a detailed lay of the land, Frachetti and Maksudov equipped a drone with remote-sensing technology called lidar (light detection and ranging). Drones are tightly regulated in Uzbekistan, but the researchers managed to get the necessary permits to fly one at the site. A lidar scanner uses laser pulses to map the features of land below. The technology has been increasingly used in archaeology—in the past few years it has helped uncover a lost Maya city sprawling beneath the rainforest canopy in Guatemala.
> This method has its limitations, Silvia says—namely, it often turns up false positives. It’s also impossible to confirm which features come from which time period without more excavation.
Despite the limitations, it's still great that this technology is making inroads in archaeology. Would be interested to see this put to work in the Sahara and other mostly unexplored/unexcavated areas. Seems to be a low-cost but potentially high-reward project.
It's only low cost by comparison to excavation, which is extraordinarily expensive. Good lidars would consume a considerable portion of the equipment budget for a field team. Back when I did this stuff, my budgets for a field season were less than a week's worth of my tech job salary.
One time I dragged a fixed wing out to the middle of Central Asia to do some aerial surveys. It went up, caught in some wind, and immediately dropped into a river never to be seen again. That one hurt.
Rejoice in the fact that you'll have unintentionally guided some 31st century archaeologist.
Or triggered a host of ancient-aliens conspiracy theories after they find remains of a drone atop a 4500yo pyramid.
Making drones out of depleted carbon to throw off the dates.
Trivia: the Portland Unipiper works for a lidar company.
"this technology is making inroads "
Making inroads by not using roads...
History is so fascinating. You read about outlandish locations, cultures, peoples as you would in a fantasy novel, then you realise it actually existed.
It seems as if our history written by mediterranean cultures and the history as a huge inland cultural gap.
I think the various Tepe's they are riding in Turkey and this discovery point to a whole new history to consider.
You might be projecting your understanding of history on the practitioners.
Yes, I'm not an expert I only went through a standard American education process. Considering that most people I know think of the Greeks as the begin gin of culture if they give it any thought at all. I would expect a truly thought comment to have some sort of interesting reference to help the ill informed to better understand the world.
Your local library will be of more help.
Stop blaming others for your lack of knowledge.
I count "Mediterranean" cultures among those "outlandish" locations that I mentioned.
Modern historians are now pretty sure there never was a "Silk Road"
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/jsb5my/comme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Name;_and_contested_...
That's not quite correct. There are two major issues with the term "silk road".
1. It implies a singular road connecting end to end, when the reality is that there's was a vast network of routes across both land and sea.
2. It implies that the routes existed primarily to transport silk. They carried a lot of things and silk probably wasn't the original or most significant good transported.
The article discusses both of these aspects, albeit imperfectly.
It was more a mesh of overland routes that connected western China to Iranian highlands, steppe routes and from there over to the Black sea and Mesopotamia. This was not a direct trade route but rather a series of interconnections. Intensity probably varied a lot over time as well.
The idea of a very lucrative direct connection between China and the Mediterranean is bunk, but the connectivity, people and goods movement was there for a long, long time, on and off.
Well then, who's to say the silk road doesn't still exist?
Silk is still traded. There is still commerce between China and Iran. Perhaps the whole world and all the infrastructure are part of the silk road!
Contesting the name based on silk not necessarily being the main cause for people to travel that way feels needlessly obtuse, exactly the kind of minor point scoring some people love when no one else cares.
Some more info here: https://saielab.wustl.edu/all-projects/tugunbulak
Archaeobotanical study here: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1371/journal.pone.0201409
...many of the most important routes of Eurasian exchange transected some of the highest mountain ranges in the world; however, limited archaeological investigation has been undertaken outside the major urban centers at lower elevations. Furthermore, there is still little scientific inquiry into what goods were actually moving along the historical trade routes. We use archaeobotanical data to study what crops were actually consumed at these medieval towns and compare the data to other sites in order to explore the spread of domesticated plants across the ancient world. We suggest that orchards and vineyards around the oasis cities of Central Asia, such as Bukhara, Khiva, Loulan, and Samarkand, provided cultivated goods for merchants and travelers, who in turn carried those fruits and grains along a nodal network and ultimately across two continents. In this article, we synthesize medieval-period botanical data and present a systematic study of botanical remains recovered from anthropogenic sediments from Tashbulak, Uzbekistan (A.D. 800–1100). We also suggest that most of the fruit crops identified in this archaeobotanical assemblage were carried to the site by merchants from lower elevations, based on the fact that many of these trees cannot grow at high elevations. By pulling together these diverse data sets and contrasting them with historical sources, we argue that arboreal crops were a prominent part of the economy across Central Asia during this period and that certain crops dispersed across Eurasia through Central Asia.
Here is the Lidar data: https://github.com/JasonLiu2024/high-resolution-lidar-traces...
Nature article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03464-5
> To get a detailed lay of the land, Frachetti and Maksudov equipped a drone with remote-sensing technology called lidar (light detection and ranging).
Anyone have more details on what kind of a lidar is this?
Zhangzhou Yuegang is the link between the Maritime Silk Road and the Continental Silk Road in fact
> Metallurgy may be a key part of how the city could sustain itself at such a high altitude. The mountains are rich in iron ore and have dense juniper forests, which could be burned to fuel the smelting process. The researchers have also uncovered coins from across modern-day Uzbekistan, Maksudov says, suggesting the city may have been a hub for trade. It doesn’t appear to have been strictly a mining settlement, either—at Tashbulak, a cemetery contains the remains of women, elderly people and infants.
>
> “We have realized that this was a large urban center, which was integrated into the Silk Road network and dragged the Silk Road caravans toward mountains ... because they had their own products to offer,” Maksudov says.
Checking, did anyone else get to this part of the article and think "Yes, this shall be my anthropological model for dwarves in my D&D game"?
No, but my thought that this represents and industrial center and it would be great to trace the iron to artifacts around the world.
I also thought that the medieval site could be built on an earlier development. I wonder how many years of production creates such a city. The city may have evolved slowly or was established all at once with the proximity to Juniper trees to iron ore.
Finally I wonder at human powered rates of deforestation how long the juniper trees could last or maybe they were cultivated.
They could stretch back to middle-earth.
It's possible that most of their production stayed in the Stans region (given all the marauding hordes afoot at the time). So maybe they were a mountainous sink for the trades, not so much a source. (Until they themselves were over-run?)
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