Abstract

During the first millennium A.D., Central Asia was marked by broad networks of exchange and interaction, what many historians collectively refer to as the “Silk Road”. Much of this contact relied on high-elevation mountain valleys, often linking towns and caravanserais through alpine territories. This cultural exchange is thought to have reached a peak in the late first millennium A.D., and these exchange networks fostered the spread of domesticated plants and animals across Eurasia. However, few systematic studies have investigated the cultivated plants that spread along the trans-Eurasian exchange during this time. New archaeobotanical data from the archaeological site of Tashbulak (800–1100 A.D.) in the mountains of Uzbekistan is shedding some light on what crops were being grown and consumed in Central Asia during the medieval period. The archaeobotanical assemblage contains grains and legumes, as well as a wide variety of fruits and nuts, which were likely cultivated at lower elevations and transported to the site. In addition, a number of arboreal fruits may have been collected from the wild or represent cultivated version of species that once grew in the wild shrubby forests of the foothills of southern Central Asia in prehistory. This study examines the spread of crops, notably arboreal crops, across Eurasia and ties together several data sets in order to add to discussions of what plant cultivation looked like in the central region of the Silk Road.

Highlights

  • The ‘Silk Road’ was an historically and archaeologically documented cultural phenomenon, characterized by gradually increasing interaction that connected communities in Central Asia to a larger social and economic sphere [1]

  • By pulling together these diverse data sets and contrasting them with historical sources, we argue that arboreal crops were a prominent part of the economy across Central Asia during this period and that certain crops dispersed across Eurasia through Central Asia

  • The data we present in this paper link the mountain routes of Eurasia, seeing that similar species have been identified at early archaeological sites as far south as Pakistan and as far north as Xinjiang

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Summary

Introduction

The ‘Silk Road’ was an historically and archaeologically documented cultural phenomenon, characterized by gradually increasing interaction that connected communities in Central Asia to a larger social and economic sphere [1]. Scholars are increasingly exploring the broader process of exchange through Central Asia, including the study of corridors of diffusion from the third millennium B.C. onward and systematic exchange systems of the late first millennium B. C. onward, collectively constituting a wide range of goods and peoples [2, 3, 4, 5]. Arboreal crops on the medieval Silk Road.

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