Samarkand and its Territory: from Archaeological Map to Cultural Landscape Management

Samarkand is at the heart of the Middle Zeravshan Valley, in an alluvial plain with an arid climate of continental extremes marked by sharp seasonal divisions: a fertile territory ideal for growing a wide range of crops, from cereals to cotton and tobacco, from grapes to plums, from mulberry to apricots and peaches. To the North, East and South the alluvium is closely surrounded by an almost continuous range of high mountains, some of them snow-capped and towering at heights of over 2500 m. Many streams descend from these mountains and irrigate the borders of the basin, forming small delta fans that cut through the steppe grasslands all around the central alluvial plan. From the mountain uplands to the riparian forest encased in the shallow meanders of the Zeravshan the landscape is divided into a closely knitted tapestry of environmental diversity, a mosaic similar to those that mark the lands of plenty everywhere else in the world. When, in 1999, as a result of the Scientific Exchange Program signed with Italy, the Government of Uzbekistan and the local authorities disclosed to the archaeologists from the University of Bologna the possibility to work at Samarkand, there were two main options: either we selected a specific historical aspect, focusing on the excavations of one or a few sites; or we chose to invest a comparable amount of time and resources to undertake a general systematic survey of the Middle Zeravshan Valley and to update the previously existing data. We chose the second way for the possibility to investigate the settlement dynamics in long term perspective on a vast region of great historical importance like Samarkand, in collaboration with the Institute of Archaeology of Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan (IAANU). Since 2001 the Ministry of Culture of Uzbekistan granted permission to develop a joint Uzbek-Italian research program aimed to realize the archaeological map of Samarkand and its territory, in order to understand the relationship between the processes of settlement dynamics and landscape transformation.