Perusing old photographs taken by the American Corona spy satellites, British archaeologists spotted this interesting pattern in eastern Kazakhstan. I have already mentioned the Corona program here before; these images are not as clear as modern satellite photos, but since they were taken in the 1960s they show a lot of stuff that has since been covered over or destroyed by modern development.
This image appears to show a community made of up walled compounds, each about 50m across. But how old was it? And who lived there?
The Brits who made this discovered reached out to authorities in Kazakhstan and organized a joint expedition to explore the site; the results of their 2018 study have been leaking out for a while, but they have now published a formal article in
Antiquity.
The site is called Semiyarka, the "City of Seven Ravines," and it dates to around 1600 B.C. It measures about 345-acres, or 145-hectares, making it one of the largest Bronze Age sites of the region. It had actually been recorded in 2000, but the people who found it did not have access to aerial imagery and did not realize its scope.
Early reports associated the site with the Andronovo Culture, which is what archaeologists call the culture of the Indo-Iranian people of the steppes, before they invaded Iran and India. But now the excavators assign it to the "Adronoid Cherkaskul Culture," which they say represents a fusion of the Andronovo culture of the Indo-Iranian interlopers with local traditions.
Some artifacts from the site. One of the main things the archaeologists found was evidence of bronze working. This fits perfectly with the Indo-European tradition; in settlements of the slightly older
Sintashta Culture, centered around the southern end of the Ural Mountains, every large house had its own hearth for smelting metals.
Andronovo Bronze Axes
Andronovo Ceramics
Every piece of evidence we find on the steppes, either archaeological or genetic, further confirms the model of Indo-European migration.
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