Fall/Winter 2010  

Back to home page

Washington University in
St. Louis

Department of Anthropology

Arts & Sciences

College of Arts & Sciences

Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Archived
Issues

 

Letter from the Field
Assistant Professor Michael Frachetti
June 26, 2010
Taly, Uzbekistan

frechetti
Kyrgyz pastoralist from whose campsite, situated outside the village of Taly, Professor Frachetti wrote his letter

Dear Anthropologists at Washington University:

Greetings from high-altitude Uzbekistan. I am writing to you from the small village of Taly (pronounced Tal-uh), located in the Malaguzar Mountains, about 25 km from the ridgeline border with Tajikistan. Although within Uzbekistan, Taly is actually occupied by a small community of ethnically Kyrgyz families who subsist as herders and farmers, raising sheep and cattle and growing grapes, potatoes, and fruit orchards. Their other major occupation is managing and logging the pine forests that grow in the high mountains above the village. In fact, aside from his duties as a local Muslim leader, our host for the night is the manager of the foresting organization in the region.

My team and I are here to organize the logistics for next year’s archaeological survey that will take place throughout this mountainous region of Central Asia. This is the first archaeological study of this region and the first project explicitly designed to address the ancient life-ways of mobile pastoralists (or nomads) in Uzbekistan. The best-known archaeology in Uzbekistan, found mostly in the lowland river deltas, reflects a long history of agriculture and urbanism that shaped cities like Afrasiyab (modern-day Samarkand) in ancient Sogdiana. The archaeology of urban development has a long history in Uzbekistan—especially from the Iron Age and Antique periods—but the archaeology of nomadic communities and mountain populations is essentially unknown here. For many in Uzbekistan, the image of “nomads” from the mountains and steppe regions to the north remains indelibly linked to the Mongolian hordes who devastated medieval cities and ravaged the agricultural lands in the territory of Uzbekistan in the 13th century. When I proposed to my colleagues that mobile pastoralists likely lived in the mountain territories of Uzbekistan since 3000 BC and were an integral part of the economic and political shaping of the region (rather than migrating hordes), my colleagues were intrigued and so our project seeks to demonstrate this with archaeological data. This is the first officially endorsed collaborative Uzbek–American expedition since 2003.

This summer is a particularly important time to be in Central Asia investigating the nature of mountain pastoralism because the border territories of Uzbekistan are currently host to thousands of Uzbek refugees who have fled violence and conflict in Kyrgyzstan, a neighboring republic traditionally identified as home to mountain nomads. After a coup of the Kyrgyz national government in the spring of 2010, violence erupted between ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks in the border city of Osh. While located in Kyrgyzstan, Osh is home to a majority population of ethnic Uzbeks. After rioting and killings, many Uzbek families fled the danger of Osh to the Ferghana valley in Uzbekistan, where Uzbek and UN relief groups are maintaining them in refugee camps until they can return to Kyrgyzstan [most have now returned]. Although this recent conflict clearly was sparked by modern political and economic concerns, many Uzbeks colloquially related the violence and aggression in Osh to the “nomadic” heritage of Kyrgyzstan, and the raiding and rioting presented a familiar storyline given the general historical notions that have shaped perceptions of nomadic populations. Could the conflict between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks not be explained as a modern case of “nomadic” hordes from the mountains attacking and deposing urban agriculturalists?

In discussing these touchy and complex issues with Uzbek scholars, Uzbek people, and ethnic Kyrgyz (in Uzbekistan), the situation is clearly far more complex. In regions where mobile pastoralists regularly interface with lowland agriculturalists (such as near Taly), political and social relationships have been highly integrated and peaceful for centuries, if not millennia. Today, ethnic Kyrgyz in Uzbekistan comfortably bend their accents to speak Uzbek, much in the same way that I have seen ethnic Uzbeks bend theirs to speak Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan; these languages are similar, analogous to Spanish/Portuguese or Danish/Swedish. It appears to me, viewing the situation from the Uzbek side of the border where the situation is peaceful, that the key issue resonating with all the ethnic communities in the region is the need for better understanding of the historical interrelationship between different communities, their economic modes, their land-use strategies, and their role in shaping broader economic and political structures. Rather than reducing communities to pseudo-ethnic categories, the school teacher I spoke with suggested that to know Uzbekistan was to know something of Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan as well. This sentiment was something I had heard from an Uzbek elder a year earlier when visiting Osh. People I speak with here grin and remark about their heterogeneous ethnic backgrounds, shading what appears evermore an ethnically pluralistic population not entirely different from the modern United States. So, it would seem that the conflicts smoldering under the surface stem from a lack of understanding about how urban-agriculturalists and mountain nomads are—in this region—both essential to the functioning and progress of a productive and peaceful social landscape.

Although the mission of my archaeological project has nothing to do with modern politics, the contemporary issues in the region cast light on the way history and prehistory are interpreted and packaged, and how they influence everyday perceptions. Thus, as I write from within the heavily carpeted and brightly decorated “guest-room” in the house of a Kyrgyz community leader of a border village in Uzbekistan, I am reminded that archaeological discoveries can engender small shifts in perception concerning the diversity of communities that have woven the fabric of this famous Silk Road region. Perhaps these small shifts can have big impacts on unfolding history of this fascinating and complex region of the world.