The archaeological site of Semiyarka was photographed from a drone
Peter J. Brown
A large 140-hectare settlement dating back 3,600 years has been discovered on the plains of northeastern Kazakhstan, changing our understanding of life in prehistoric Eurasia. This hints that the open grasslands of Central Asia once contained a Bronze Age community as connected and complex as many better-known ancient civilizations.
“It’s not really the missing piece of the puzzle, it’s the missing half of the puzzle,” says Barry Molloy at University College Dublin, Ireland, who was not involved in the work.
Bronze Age many famous civilizations are represented, including the Shang and Zhou dynasties of China; That Babylonians And Sumerians in what is now Iraq; and numerous cultures of the Mediterranean, including the Egyptians, Minoans, Mycenaeans and Hittites.
However, the Central Asian steppes were believed to be the territory of highly mobile communities living in tents or yurts. Semiyarka, or the “City of Seven Ravines,” looks completely different and could have played a decisive role in the spread of bronze items between civilizations.
This is because the site, first discovered in the early 2000s, overlooks the Irtysh River, which originates in the Altai Mountains in China, descends into the plains of Kazakhstan and reaches the Arctic through Siberia.
Miljana Radivojevic from University College London and her colleagues have been mapping and exploring the site since 2016. They discovered that Semiyarka had long mounds of earth, presumably for defense; at least 20 closed outbuildings, probably built of mud brick; and a central monumental building, which they suggest may have been used for ritual or administration. The types of pottery they found there indicate that the site dates back to around 1600 BC.
Importantly, the crucibles, slag and bronze artifacts at the site indicate that a large area was devoted to the production of copper and tin bronze, an alloy that is primarily copper but contains more than 2 percent tin.
The composition of the elements in the slag from the crucibles matches tin deposits from part of the Altai Mountains in eastern Kazakhstan, about 300 kilometers away, Radivojevic says.
According to her, the tin could have been brought there by people crossing the steppe, or by boat along the Irtysh, or perhaps it was poured out of the water. “The Irtysh is the most important tin-bearing river in Bronze Age Eurasia, and seasonal flooding of the river's floodplain would have been very beneficial for tin panning.”
The large size and neat lines of Semiyarka are very different from what can be seen in the scattered sites and small villages usually associated with mobile steppe communities.
Without the detailed excavations that are planned, we cannot know whether all the buildings were there at the same time or were successive structures over the years, says a team member. and Lawrence at Durham University, UK. “But the layout is very clear, and that usually means it's all modern, because you won't find these things in a neat line if they're built one after the other.”
Researchers suggest that due to its location on the river near large deposits of copper and tin, Semiyarka was not only a center of bronze production, but also a center of exchange and regional power, a key node in the vast network of Bronze Age metals linking Central Asia with the rest of the continent.
“The Irtysh River was a very busy transportation corridor,” Lawrence says. “Essentially, this lays the foundations for the Silk Road as we know it today, a kind of pre-modern globalization.”
The site changes our understanding of Bronze Age steppe societies, says Radivojevic, showing that they were as complex as other modern civilizations.
“What this tells us is that they were organized, that they were able to provide resources and defend themselves,” Molloy says. “The transfer of materials such as ores and metals into a centralized space speaks to a level of social organization that goes beyond the immediate local, and it fits into broader networks that we know crossed Eurasia where metals moved, and they are a key link in terms of those broader networks.”
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