CAI | Human Movements in Central Eurasia Across Prehistoric and Historical Timescales with Michael Frachetti
Human Movements in Central Eurasia Across Prehistoric and Historical Timescales with Michael Frachetti, Washington University in St. Louis. This lecture is focused on the results of his ongoing fieldwork at the newly documented high-altitude cities of Tashbulak and Tugunbulak (6th-11th c.CE) to illustrate new insights into the economic and political impacts of turkic nomadic hegemonies in shaping Central Asia and the Silk Roads, centuries before the Mongol Empire.
This event is sponsored by the Central Asia Initiative and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund.
Speakers
Michael Frachetti is Professor of Archaeology and the Co-Director of The Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures at Washington University in St. Louis. The main focus of his research concerns the economic and social strategies of prehistoric and historic societies living in the steppes, mountains and deserts of Central and Eastern Eurasia. His work aims to understand the relationships between political, economic, and environmental change through time, most recently how the rise of urban centers along Central Asia’s Silk Routes contributed to the formation of wide-reaching nomadic political hegemony and exchange networks across Eurasia. Dr. Frachetti has led archaeological field research in Kazakhstan since 1999 and currently co-directs excavations at Tugunbulak, Uzbekistan under the Silk Roads High-elevation Hubs project. His more than two decades of collaborative research spans topics such as ancient genomics, metallurgical trade networks, origins of agro-pastoralist subsistence across Asia and the nature of social complexity among Eurasian societies. His books include Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia (2008, U. California Press), Globalization in Prehistory (co-editor, 2019, Cambridge Univ. Press), and articles such as “Nomadic Ecology shaped the highland geography of Asia’s Silk Roads” (2017, Nature) and “Large-scale medieval urbanism traced by UAV-Lidar in Highland Central Asia” (2024, Nature).