Lost Silk Road Cities Discovered High in the Mountains of Central Asia

One time I dragged a fixed wing out to the middle of Central Asia to do some aerial surveys. It went up, caught in some wind, and immediately dropped into a river never to be seen again. That one hurt.

Making inroads by not using roads...

I think the various Tepe's they are riding in Turkey and this discovery point to a whole new history to consider.

1. It implies a singular road connecting end to end, when the reality is that there's was a vast network of routes across both land and sea.

2. It implies that the routes existed primarily to transport silk. They carried a lot of things and silk probably wasn't the original or most significant good transported.

The article discusses both of these aspects, albeit imperfectly.

...many of the most important routes of Eurasian exchange transected some of the highest mountain ranges in the world; however, limited archaeological investigation has been undertaken outside the major urban centers at lower elevations. Furthermore, there is still little scientific inquiry into what goods were actually moving along the historical trade routes. We use archaeobotanical data to study what crops were actually consumed at these medieval towns and compare the data to other sites in order to explore the spread of domesticated plants across the ancient world. We suggest that orchards and vineyards around the oasis cities of Central Asia, such as Bukhara, Khiva, Loulan, and Samarkand, provided cultivated goods for merchants and travelers, who in turn carried those fruits and grains along a nodal network and ultimately across two continents. In this article, we synthesize medieval-period botanical data and present a systematic study of botanical remains recovered from anthropogenic sediments from Tashbulak, Uzbekistan (A.D. 800–1100). We also suggest that most of the fruit crops identified in this archaeobotanical assemblage were carried to the site by merchants from lower elevations, based on the fact that many of these trees cannot grow at high elevations. By pulling together these diverse data sets and contrasting them with historical sources, we argue that arboreal crops were a prominent part of the economy across Central Asia during this period and that certain crops dispersed across Eurasia through Central Asia.

I also thought that the medieval site could be built on an earlier development. I wonder how many years of production creates such a city. The city may have evolved slowly or was established all at once with the proximity to Juniper trees to iron ore.

Finally I wonder at human powered rates of deforestation how long the juniper trees could last or maybe they were cultivated.

They could stretch back to middle-earth.