Hidden in the towering mountains of Central Asia, along what has been called the Silk Road, archaeologists are uncovering two medieval cities that may have bustled with inhabitants a thousand years ago.
A team first noticed one of the lost cities in 2011 while hiking the grassy mountains of eastern Uzbekistan in search of untold history. The archaeologists trekked along the riverbed and spotted burial sites along the way to the top of one of the mountains. Once there, a plateau dotted with strange mounds spread before them. To the untrained eye, these mounds wouldn’t have looked like much. But “as archaeologists…, [we] recognize them as anthropogenic places, as places where people live,” says Farhod Maksudov of the National Center of Archaeology of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences.
The ground, too, was littered with thousands of pottery shards. “We were kind of blown away,” says Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He and Maksudov had been in search of archaeological evidence of nomadic cultures that grazed their herds on the mountain pastures. The researchers never expected to find a 30-acre medieval city in a relatively inhospitable climate around 7,000 feet above sea level.
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But this site, called Tashbulak, after the area’s present-day name, was only the beginning. While excavating in 2015, Frachetti met with one of the region’s only current inhabitants—a forestry inspector who lives with his family a few miles from Tashbulak. “He said, ‘In my backyard, I’ve seen ceramics like that,’” Frachetti recalls. So the archaeologists drove to the forestry inspector’s farmstead, where they found that his home rested on a familiar-looking…
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