The 10th-11th century CE was a period a significant change across Asia - most notably in Central Asia where new religious institutions took hold amongst Turkic nomadic empires and the economies of Silk Route states grew opportunistically astride new technologies such as steel (among other things).  This talk presents recently exposed archaeological and historical details from a newly discovered urban complex, high in the mountains of Uzbekistan, which shines new light on the intersection of ideological participation, industrial growth, and environmental exploitation by members of the Qarakhanid Empire. The site, Tashbulak, asks us to reconsider some of the fundamental social and structural aspects of the Medieval Silk Routes and recasts the history of urbanism and industry amongst nomadic empires of Central Asia.

Michael Frachetti is the Director of the Spatial Analysis, Interpretation, and Exploration (SAIE) laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, and Director of the ARQ (Archaeology Research of the Qarakhanids), Uzbekistan, as well as the DMAP (Dzhungar Mountains Archaeology Project), Kazakhstan. He focuses his research on the study of Bronze Age nomadism in the Eurasian Steppe. Specifically, he is interested in understanding patterns of mobility of prehistoric pastoralists as they relate to the regional ecological variation, and dynamic social interactions. His work uses Geographic Information Systems, Remote Sensing, and Spatial Modeling to explore all aspects of social landscapes and their formation including settlement patterning, resources capacity, range ecology, burial and ritual constructions, and the impact of climate and climate change. In addition, He is also engaged with a number of other spatial analysis projects concerning Medieval Islamic landscapes in North Africa, as well as Scythian burial geography in Ukraine.