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What Forgotten Cities Tell Us About America’s Future
What happens when trade leaves you behind?
More than 6,000 feet above sea level, in the remote mountains of Uzbekistan, a forest inspector found some pottery shards on his property. They looked old. He showed them to some researchers, who, on their travels through the area, had also found a few medieval-looking artifacts scattered across the barren plateau.
The researchers, from Washington University in St. Louis, returned with officials from the Uzbek archaeology directorate a few years later to take a closer look. They took advantage of the treeless nature of the hills to analyze the site with drone-based lidar. The drones found two large cities, each 1,000 years old, which the archaeologists called Tashbulak and Tugunbulak.
Both cities were big — the larger one, Tugunbulak, was double the size of medieval Genoa, one of Europe’s most important trade cities, but at an altitude not much lower than Machu Picchu’s. The archaeologists went on to find hundreds of buildings, cemeteries, palaces, and more.
Why had these big cities thrived in the remote mountains of Central Asia — and what had turned them into abandoned ruins? The answer in each case was the same: the Silk Road.
