Kyrgyzstan

The question of the earliest spread of a domesticated package of crops and animals into Central Asia has garnered archaeological attention for over a century. Over the past decade, it seemed likely that the broad answers to this question had been resolved, with early sedentary villages forming in far southern Central Asia and a gradual spread of farming peoples northward over time. However, recent discoveries at sites such as Tangtian Cave (Zhou et al., 2020) have provided evidence that suggests archaeologists have only scratched the surface of this debate. Dr. Svetlana Shneider has conducted a series of excavations in the Ferghana Valley of Kyrgyzstan to identify the earliest human occupations in the region and trace the initial spread of domesticated plants and animals into northern Central Asia. She chose the foothills around the Ferghana Valley because this region has long been one of the key breadbaskets for Central Asia. She has directed projects at several different cave and rockshelter sites and supervised collaborations with the Spengler Lab, notably with Dr. Kseniia Boxleitner, in search of the earliest evidence for agricultural crops. 

In 2018, while working at the Obishir Cave site, tucked within the Alay Mountain Range, the team uncovered a handful of splinted bone fragments, which were later identified using aDNA as the remains of domesticated sheep and goat (Taylor et al. 2021). These small fragments of bone pushed back the earliest dates for domestication in Central Asia to at least 8,000 years, making the region one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited pastoral landscapes. The article, published in Nature: Human Behavior, illustrates the spread of domesticated sheep and goat from the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia and nearby mountain zones to the core areas of Central Asia. These data not only filled in an important piece of the puzzle of the Neolithization of Inner Asia, but also led the team to develop a new research agenda. Collaborations between the Spengler Lab and the PaleoCentralAsia team continue, with discoveries emerging every year (Taylor et al. 2020). 

Caves and rock shelters have attracted humans for hundreds of thousands of years. The well-preserved sediments within these natural time capsules provide detailed environmental, paleontological, and archaeological information. The Tian Shan and Pamir Mountains have served as a significant cultural corridor for human movement between Central and East Asia throughout the Quaternary. Studies of caves and rock shelters located at various elevations and spanning a broad time period are clarifying many pressing issues in Central Asian archaeology, including the routes of dispersal for plants and animals, the evolutionary changes of these organisms over time, and the dynamics of prehistoric cultural change. The Spengler Lab is studying archaeobotanical remains recovered from four recently excavated cave sites in Central Asia: Obishir-5, Surungur, Sel’Ungur, Istikskaya, and Kurteke, all of which have been excavated by PaleoCentralAsia. The Obishir-5, Sel’Ungur, and Surungur sites are located in the southern part of the Ferghana Valley, Kyrgyzstan—a crossroads between the western steppe and high mountain regions (Shneider et al. 2023a, Shneider et al. 2023b). While the Istikskaya and the Kurteke sites provide insights into the archaeology of high-elevation mountain occupations in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. The team seeks to reconstruct cooking habits, to trace possible trade and exchange relations with neighboring territories, to learn about the timing of intentional cultivation of plants in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, to have insights into interactions between changing environmental conditions and everyday life of people (e.g., fuel choices, plant availability) throughout the Holocene. Our collaborators from Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan are essential members of the project.