In the open grasslands of present-day Kazakhstan, there was once a Bronze Age settlement that may have been a center of exchange and power around 1600. Ave. Cr.
The settlement, called Semiyarka and nicknamed the “City of Seven Ravines” because of its location overlooking a network of valleys, was first discovered in the early 2000s, but only an international team of archaeologists surveying the site since 2018 has revealed its impressive size and potential importance in the Eurasian steppe. The team discovered a large area that once contained many houses, a central monumental building that may have been used for ritual or governance, and possibly even tin-bronze metal production facilities.
Their findings, published Monday in the journal Antiquity, are just the beginning, the study authors said.
“This is very interesting because tin-bronze production in this area is such a rare find,” said lead author Miljana Radivojević, Associate Professor of Archaeological Sciences at University College London, UK. “We know that we have hundreds of thousands of Bronze Age tin artifacts in the Eurasian steppe, and we only have one published tin bronze production site. And this is the second one.” Tin bronze allowed for stronger tools and other materials, Radivojević added.
Archaeologists unearthed this bronze object in Semiyarka. – VK Merz and IK Merz
As the team now begins excavating the site, they say the ongoing discoveries at Semiyarka are changing what we know about urban life in prehistoric Eurasia.
“We just don’t have anything like this,” said study co-author Dan Lawrence, a professor of archeology at Durham University in the UK. He added that there are almost no established settlements in the steppe. “What you get across this landscape, we associate with mobile pastoral groups and we think they were in tents or yurts. What we have here is something that is very distinctly different.”
At 140 hectares (about 346 hectares) above the Irtysh River valley, the settlement’s large size and strategic location may indicate that the Bronze Age steppe contained complex cities similar to those found in more urbanized parts of the world at the time, Lawrence added.
Exploring the long lost city
To find the boundaries of the settlement, Lawrence led the team in a research project that looked at satellite images and analyzed every 50-meter square across the site. They only explored the surface, finding pottery fragments, including at least 114 ceramic vessels, and other artifacts scattered throughout the settlement.
The team also used images from Corona spy photography from the 1960s to determine where the ground had been disturbed over the past few decades, as well as magnetometry, a non-invasive survey technique that allows archaeologists to see buried structures and metal objects without digging.
Drone photo of Semiyarka archaeological site, taken in 2018. in July – Courtesy of Peter J. Brown
The next step, excavation, is currently underway, and Radivojevicius says more discoveries have already been made. “What was announced is that we had indications – we looked at materials that were crucibles, slags and artifacts, and we could just put them together and say, well, these are bronzes,” she said. “But as we go, we have more discoveries, so I was more confident that I was talking about, say, larger-scale metallurgical production at the site.”
However, not everyone agrees whether Semiyarka resembled a large city. “The results, at least as presented in the paper, would be a resounding NO to this question, especially given the low-density surface scatter of pottery shards and what appears to be equally low-density metallurgical evidence,” James Johnson, an archaeologist and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, said in an email.
“Cities are spatial and demographic entities that typically represent a complex interaction of the built environment, population density and sprawl, and material culture (as well as many other sociological factors),” he added. The small number of pottery finds may indicate the limited use of pottery common to prehistoric steppe societies, and that pottery may not be “the best category of material culture associated with the population density typically associated with urban populations.”
Johnson said further research into the Middle Ages, burial mounds that provide a glimpse into people’s past lives, and surface collections outside the settlement would help archaeologists better understand settlement patterns.
While Lawrence agrees that there isn’t enough evidence to conclude that the settlement was a large city, “I also think we can’t say it’s a resounding no for the same reasons,” he said.
The relatively small amount of pottery remains can be attributed to the fact that the ground is undisturbed and compacted by several feet of snow each winter; Lawrence noted that many of the artifacts may still be underground.
He continued: “Urban settlements have different things going on than rural areas. For example, nowadays you have to go to the city to get heavy industry, luxury shops or a seat of political power. I think we can say that Semiyarka is a city in the sense that it is very different from the surrounding settlements and provides exactly such urban services.”
Semiyarka may be evidence that the region found a balance between typical pastoral mobile sites and other important elements of society, such as the production of tin bronze, one of the most important technologies of the time, said Michael Frachetti, a professor of archeology at Washington University in St. Louis.
“While the archaeological scale and function of these central sites is still emerging, the results so far raise many questions about the organizational choices of steppe societies in terms of metallurgy, political organization, and economic connectivity at both local and regional scales,” Frachetti said in an email. Frachetti, who specialized in grazing during the Bronze Age, was also not involved in the study.
In search of answers
There is not much evidence for settlements in the Eurasian steppe during the Bronze Age; Most of the sites were mobile and didn’t leave much archaeological evidence, Lawrence said. But the grasslands have not received much archaeological attention, he added, and there may be many settlements left to uncover.
In future research, the study authors said they hope to find more evidence of Semiyarka’s potentially powerful role in the Bronze Age, as well as insights into urban life and metal production on the steppe.
So far, their research has revealed the outlines of at least 15 structures throughout the settlement, some of which show that they are houses with internal rooms.
How many people lived there? How long did the settlement last? What connections did the city have with other areas? Lawrence hopes the excavation process will provide answers.
“This site is very interesting because it just stands apart from everything we thought we knew about Central Asia until now,” Lawrence said. “And it’s very interesting to understand how it got there and why it happened and how it relates to these much bigger stories, and we can’t answer that yet, but now that we know the site is there, we can start building a program to try to understand what it means.”
Taylor Nicoli is a freelance journalist based in New York.
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