Beyond the Silk Roads Trade: Irrigated Agriculture in the Middle Zeravshan Valley, Samarkand Oasis (Uzbekistan)

Located in the middle of the Eurasian landmass, Samarkand has always been a major socio-political entity of ancient Sogdiana. Despite its fame is closely connected to the rich trades along the Great Silk Road, historically Samarkand developed in close connection with its hinterland. However, like elsewhere in Central Asia, the arid conditions have been making life and economic activities almost impossible without an appropriate resource management. This contribution presents the results of the last two decades of the Uzbek-Italian Archaeological Project in Samarkand. The activities conducted both at regional and local scale allowed to reconstruct the settlement dynamics and the landscape transformations of this territory in a diachronic perspective. An approach combining remote sensing techniques with geo-archaeological field surveys unveiled a masterplan that ensured a rational exploitation of the territory: urban spaces around the city; areas for irrigated agriculture in the plain; pasture lands and burial areas in the foothill. Thousands of settlements depended on a complex irrigation system based on the Dargom and other canals fed by the Zeravshan river since the pre-Islamic period. However, an ongoing investigation suggests a significant transformation in the settlement pattern and irrigation network following the Arab conquest of the region at the beginning of the 8th century.