Drone-mounted lidar helped to reveal 12 hectare city Tashbulak near Tugunbulak
Cylab, J. Burner, M. Facheti
More than 2000 meters above sea level, on a grass hill plateau in eastern Uzbekistan, two archaeologists set out for a walk Discovered Some amazing. This cool, wild landscape was once home to two huge cities, whose markets were buzzing with passengers coming from Silk Road trade routes connecting China to the west. What was left in these communities with millenniums was pieces of thousands of earthen pots scattered in the plateau – and heavyly destroyed earthen mounds and troughs, which identified where buildings, walls and roads stood.
Fortunately, researcher Farhod Maqsudov of Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences and Michael Fracheti of Washington University at St. Louis, Missouri, were capable of highlighting the infrastructure lost to cities without picking up a single shovel. They performed it with a drone-mounted lidar, a remote sensing system that uses laser to make 3D maps of the area.
The analysis showed that Tashbulak is a 12 hectare city, about 5 kilometers from the Tugunbulak, which has occupied an area of ​​more than a huge square kilometers. In a paper published this year, scholars have described the houses with high density of industrial workshops dedicated to strongholds, fours, metallurities. His existence challenged many long -standing beliefs about the places of Central Asian trade routes a thousand years ago.
2024 Such methods had a banner year for ancient historical discoveries. Luke Ald-Thomas, a graduate student at Tulane University in Louisiana, published a published paper How about how he discovered one of the largest Maya cities in Latin America. He did so from his computer, using lidar data from a survey conducted years ago at the Mexican State Campeche.
This ancient, uninhabited metropolis, called Valeriana, is located in the middle of a tropical forest. It had high routes, ball courts, plaza, terraced farms, a dam and a deep reservoir for sports events. Lidar is an ideal tool for understanding the characteristics hidden by vegetation, and the city is completely covered with forest today. But in the 8th century, the inhabitants used their simplicity that converted such an environment into urban paradise, which had space for about 50,000 people.
Valeriana was flooded around at the same time when the traders of Silk Road were passing through Tashbulak and Tugunbulak, probably eating dumplings. (Yes there sufficient evidence That silk road passenger Eat so much rent.) Relations with these ancient cities gave rise to inter-cultural traditions and long distance commercial relations, whose refinement can be a rival to the experience of those urban people today.
It is also possible that the twin cities of Valeriana and Tashbulak and Tugunbulak were abandoned due to problems that many modern people could groan. Ald-Thomas and his colleagues suggest that climate change may cause drought that has made Valeriana unstable in such a large population size. And the fate of Silk Road cities Got up and fell With political empires that controlled supply chains in business networks. When the profits were over, the city dwellers of medieval Uzbekistan must have gone to the pasture pastures.
A thousand years later, many of us are once again facing climate change and political instability. High-tech archeology reminds us that we are not the first people to go through such a time. If our ancestors survive them, we can also survive.
Anali Nuts is a science journalist and writer. His latest book Stories R Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. They are the co-genre of Hugo winner Podcast Under Opinion R coroctic. You can follow them @annaaleen and their website is techsploation.com
Subject:
(Tagstootronate) Archaeological (T) Climate (T) Ancient Human
