Turquoise Mining and Exchange in Ancient Central Asia: Preliminary Results from the Kyzylkum Desert, Uzbekistan

of and motivation for interregional exchange? How did turquoise from the Kyzylkum complement or compete at different times with turquoise extraction in the great mines of Iran, particularly those of Nishapur? I foresee that most of these questions will be partially or completely answered through a combination of fieldwork, scientific analysis, and computational modeling, and this poster presents the preliminary results of this combined research.
FIELD WORK: In relation to fieldwork, you can read in more detail about the results of the first survey season in the Kyzylkum (conducted under the purview of the Uzbek-American Mission to Bukhara). We were able to locate the mines and gathered some first impressions about their extent. My guide to finding the mines was a very summary and vague report published in the mid-1960s by the team of the Ancient Mines Mapping Party, that surveyed and recorded traces of pre-modern mining activity in the Kyzylkum, including turquoise. All their notes and materials are reportedly stored in the Institute of Ethnography in Moscow, where I was heading after this conference, but now I am just hoping that they are in Tashkent, as I heard more recently.
SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS: During this survey I also collected geological samples from several mining areas. A combination of scientific techniques will be used to characterize these specimens from a chemical and mineralogical point of view, and form the basis of a provenance study. I have started the XRF analysis in partnership with Federico Caro at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York city. Federico had already conducted similar work on samples from Iran and the Sinai and now the study was complemented with samples from the Kyzylkum. The initial results are indeed very promising. Samples from the Kyzylkum (in the pink polygon) are clearly distinguishable from Iranian (blue) and Egyptian mines (yellow) because of their Lower copper to iron and copper to zinc ratios.
The next step involves analyzing turquoise stones from provenanced archaeological materials dating to this “ancient period”. This will be done in partnership with selected museums, but more to come in the near future.
These analyses will allow us to connect the sources of turquoise stones to their archaeological findspots and outline (using GIS) certain tendencies about the direction and intensity of these exchange networks.
To complement the final remarks that I include in the poster, I am convinced that turquoise offers a stimulating case-study to explore a variety of very opportune issues. First, the study of turquoise allows the adoption of a genuine interdisciplinary approach through the combination of GIS, scientific analysis, ethnographic studies, historical sources, and archaeological data. Importantly, also, it questions the peripheral, remote, and dependent character often attributed to local desert environments in relation to settled, cosmopolitan areas of the pre-modern world. Finally, the material culture perspective taken here—which focuses on the life-history of turquoise through its stages of mining and exchange—pushes us beyond issues of methodological nationalism or nativist discourses and instead illuminates the complex links of connectivity and mobility that have tied people and objects together in central Eurasia since prehistoric times. A better understanding of these interactions is particularly timely, especially if we wish to reformulate the way we understand the ancient and modern dimensions of the so-called “Silk Roads” and the increasingly fundamental place of Central Asia in global historical narratives.