Lunch Club provides affiliates of the Stanford Archaeology Center with a community-oriented forum for engagement with current issues in archaeology. On October 6, 2025,  we will host Dr. Zachary William Silvia from Stanford Archaeology Center.

Abstract:

This talk presents preliminary results of ongoing archaeological research in the Kyzylkum Desert outside of the Bukhara Oasis in western Uzbekistan. From the mid-1st millennium BCE through 1st c. CE parts of the Kyzylkum desert were a vast agricultural oasis sustained by rivers and substantive canal networks, constituting the westernmost extent of ancient Sogdiana. After the arrival of Greco-Macedonians with Alexander of Macedon western Sogdiana experienced substantial intensification that reached its crux under the archaeologically elusive Kangju empire at the turn of the 1st millennium CE. Then substantial rural areas were rapidly abandoned. Through an ongoing, broad remote sensing survey parts of this vast, now arid agricultural oasis is beginning to emerge. These new data allow us to assess for the first time the broader ecological effects of decision-making in Central Asia’s rural frontiers during the Hellenistic and Post-Hellenistic Periods, and the role these ancient anthropogenic processes played in the formation of the modern Kyzylkum.