Large-scale medieval urbanism traced by UAV-lidar in highland Central Asia.

Aerial light detection and ranging (lidar) has emerged as a powerful technology for mapping urban archaeological landscapes, especially where dense vegetation obscures site visibility. More recently, uncrewed aerial vehicle/drone lidar scanning has markedly improved the resolution of three-dimensional point clouds, allowing for the detection of slight traces of structural features at centimetres of detail across large archaeological sites, a method particularly useful in areas such as mountains, where rapid deposition and erosion irregularly bury and expose archaeological remains. Here we present the results of uncrewed aerial vehicle-lidar surveys in Central Asia, conducted at two recently discovered archaeological sites in southeastern Uzbekistan: Tashbulak and Tugunbulak.

Archaeological and molecular evidence for ancient chickens in Central Asia.

The origins and dispersal of the chicken across the ancient world remains one of the most enigmatic questions regarding Eurasian domesticated animals. The lack of agreement concerning timing and centers of origin is due to issues with morphological identifications, a lack of direct dating, and poor preservation of thin, brittle bird bones. Here we show that chickens were widely raised across southern Central Asia from the fourth century BC through medieval periods, likely dispersing along the ancient Silk Road.

Geospatial modelling of farmer-herder interactions maps cultural geography of Bronze and Iron Age Tibet, 3600-2200 BP.

Tibetan cultures reflect deeply rooted, regional interactions and diverse subsistence practices across varied high-altitude environments of the Tibetan Plateau. Yet, it remains unclear how these cultural relationships and social interactions took shape through time and how they were influenced by ecologically oriented behavioral strategies (e.g.

Drought as a trigger of the rapid rise of professional skateboarding in 1970s Southern California.

In 1977 California, authorities responded to an extreme drought with an unprecedented state order to drastically reduce domestic water usage and leave countless newly built swimming pools empty. These curved pools became "playgrounds" for inspired surfers to develop professional vertical skateboarding in the Los Angeles area. Industrial production of polyurethane, and the advent of digital photography, laser printing, and high gloss mass media further contributed to the explosive popularization of skateboarding, creating a global subculture and multibillion-dollar industry that still impacts music, fashion, and lifestyle worldwide.

The dahliagram: An interdisciplinary tool for investigation, visualization, and communication of past human-environmental interaction.

Investigation into the nexus of human-environmental behavior has seen increasing collaboration of archaeologists, historians, and paleo-scientists. However, many studies still lack interdisciplinarity and overlook incompatibilities in spatiotemporal scaling of environmental and societal data and their uncertainties. Here, we argue for a strengthened commitment to collaborative work and introduce the "dahliagram" as a tool to analyze and visualize quantitative and qualitative knowledge from diverse disciplinary sources and epistemological backgrounds.

Tin from Uluburun shipwreck shows small-scale commodity exchange fueled continental tin supply across Late Bronze Age Eurasia.

This paper provides the first comprehensive sourcing analysis of the tin ingots carried by the well-known Late Bronze Age shipwreck found off the Turkish coast at Uluburun (ca. 1320 BCE). Using lead isotope, trace element, and tin isotope analyses, this study demonstrates that ores from Central Asia (Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) were used to produce one-third of the Uluburun tin ingots.

Ethics of DNA research on human remains: five globally applicable guidelines.

We are a group of archaeologists, anthropologists, curators and geneticists representing diverse global communities and 31 countries. All of us met in a virtual workshop dedicated to ethics in ancient DNA research held in November 2020. There was widespread agreement that globally applicable ethical guidelines are needed, but that recent recommendations grounded in discussion about research on human remains from North America are not always generalizable worldwide.

High mitochondrial diversity of domesticated goats persisted among Bronze and Iron Age pastoralists in the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor.

Goats were initially managed in the Near East approximately 10,000 years ago and spread across Eurasia as economically productive and environmentally resilient herd animals. While the geographic origins of domesticated goats (Capra hircus) in the Near East have been long-established in the zooarchaeological record and, more recently, further revealed in ancient genomes, the precise pathways by which goats spread across Asia during the early Bronze Age (ca. 3000 to 2500 cal BC) and later remain unclear.

The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia.

By sequencing 523 ancient humans, we show that the primary source of ancestry in modern South Asians is a prehistoric genetic gradient between people related to early hunter-gatherers of Iran and Southeast Asia. After the Indus Valley Civilization's decline, its people mixed with individuals in the southeast to form one of the two main ancestral populations of South Asia, whose direct descendants live in southern India. Simultaneously, they mixed with descendants of Steppe pastoralists who, starting around 4000 years ago, spread via Central Asia to form the other main ancestral population.

Early integration of pastoralism and millet cultivation in Bronze Age Eurasia.

Mobile pastoralists are thought to have facilitated the first trans-Eurasian dispersals of domesticated plants during the Early Bronze Age (ca 2500-2300 BC). Problematically, the earliest seeds of wheat, barley and millet in Inner Asia were recovered from human mortuary contexts and do not inform on local cultivation or subsistence use, while contemporaneous evidence for the use and management of domesticated livestock in the region remains ambiguous. We analysed mitochondrial DNA and multi-stable isotopic ratios (δC, δN and δO) of faunal remains from key pastoralist sites in the Dzhungar Mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan.

Farming strategies of 1st millennium CE agro-pastoralists on the southern foothills of the Tianshan Mountains: A geoarchaeological and macrobotanical investigation of the Mohuchahangoukou (MGK) site, Xinjiang, China.

Archaeological evidence emerging over the past decade clearly illustrates that agro-pastoralists living along the foothills of major mountain chains in Central Asia (the so-called "Inner Asian Mountain Corridor" or IAMC) facilitated the spread of domesticated grains through their direct involvement in farming. While the environmental conditions across the northwestern slopes of the IAMC provided adequate resources for incipient farming and herding as early as the mid-3rd mill. BCE, the development of local agricultural strategies on the extremely arid and eroded foothills on the southeastern, leeward side of the mountains remain comparatively less studied.

Correction: Arboreal crops on the medieval Silk Road: Archaeobotanical studies at Tashbulak.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Arboreal crops on the medieval Silk Road: Archaeobotanical studies at Tashbulak.

During the first millennium A.D., Central Asia was marked by broad networks of exchange and interaction, what many historians collectively refer to as the "Silk Road".

Urban and nomadic isotopic niches reveal dietary connectivities along Central Asia's Silk Roads.

The ancient 'Silk Roads' formed a vast network of trade and exchange that facilitated the movement of commodities and agricultural products across medieval Central Asia via settled urban communities and mobile pastoralists. Considering food consumption patterns as an expression of socio-economic interaction, we analyse human remains for carbon and nitrogen isotopes in order to establish dietary intake, then model isotopic niches to characterize dietary diversity and infer connectivity among communities of urbanites and nomadic pastoralists. The combination of low isotopic variation visible within urban groups with isotopic distinction between urban communities irrespective of local environmental conditions strongly suggests localized food production systems provided primary subsistence rather than agricultural goods exchanged along trade routes.

Nomadic ecology shaped the highland geography of Asia's Silk Roads.

There are many unanswered questions about the evolution of the ancient 'Silk Roads' across Asia. This is especially the case in their mountainous stretches, where harsh terrain is seen as an impediment to travel. Considering the ecology and mobility of inner Asian mountain pastoralists, we use 'flow accumulation' modelling to calculate the annual routes of nomadic societies (from 750 m to 4,000 m elevation).

Early agriculture and crop transmission among Bronze Age mobile pastoralists of Central Eurasia.

Archaeological research in Central Eurasia is exposing unprecedented scales of trans-regional interaction and technology transfer between East Asia and southwest Asia deep into the prehistoric past. This article presents a new archaeobotanical analysis from pastoralist campsites in the mountain and desert regions of Central Eurasia that documents the oldest known evidence for domesticated grains and farming among seasonally mobile herders. Carbonized grains from the sites of Tasbas and Begash illustrate the first transmission of southwest Asian and East Asian domesticated grains into the mountains of Inner Asia in the early third millennium BC.