From June 9 to July 3, 2023, an international Russian-Tajik expedition with the participation of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography SB RAS worked on the territory of the Eastern Pamirs. The main purpose of the expedition is to study the sites of the Stone Age, where it is possible to record episodes of the earliest settlement of the region by ancient man.
The average heights of the valleys of the Eastern Pamirs are 3600-4000 meters above sea level. The climate of the region is mountainous, harsh, sharply continental. An active archaeological study of this harsh region was carried out in Soviet times by V. A. Ranov, V. A. Zhukov and M. A. Bubnova. In the Eastern Pamirs, they discovered and studied many archaeological monuments of the Stone Age, most of which are lifting complexes. Also, in the course of these works, multilayer objects were discovered and investigated.
“The work of our group on the territory of the Eastern Pamirs is being carried out for the third time, previously we worked there in 2018 and 2019. In 2023, we were able to resume our research,” says Masnav Navrukzbekov, head of the expedition from Tajikistan, Researcher at the Department of Ethnography Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tajikistan.
“In this year’s field season, we focused on sampling from monuments that we had already studied earlier, as well as on conducting archaeological surveys. We identified several groups in our squad, thanks to which we managed to obtain the most extensive scientific results. We have discovered 10 new archaeological sites,” commented Svetlana Vladimirovna Schneider, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography SB RAS and Head of work from Russia.
“An important result is the discovery of five new objects with rock paintings. During the Soviet period, three similar monuments were discovered, our expedition in 2019 – four more, and this year five. Such a variety of them indicates that the tradition of applying rock carvings was much more widespread in the region than previously assumed,” he shared Bobomullo Bobomulloev, Researcher The National Museum of Antiquities of Tajikistan, a member of the expedition.
The uniqueness of these works lies in the fact that at a new methodological level and at a new level of knowledge, archaeologists are again approaching the problem of settlement of the highlands, while they touch upon such fundamental problems as glaciation in the region and its scale during the final Pleistocene – Early Holocene. Recently, researchers published an article that indicates that the region was already settling in the final Pleistocene.
Financing of the work was carried out The Russian Scientific Foundation.
A source: https://e-cis.info/news/569/110560/
