Lost Silk Road cities unearthed in Uzbekistan’s high mountains

“The history of Central Asia is now changing with this finding,” said archaeologist Farhod Maksudov, who was part of the research team.

The team believes Tugunbulak and the smaller city, Tashbulak, were bustling settlements between the 8th and 11th centuries, during the Middle Ages, when the area was controlled by a powerful Turkic dynasty.

Only 3% of the world’s population live above this altitude today. Lhasa in Tibet and Cusco in Peru are among the rare examples.

The discovery led by Mr Maksudov, director of Uzbekistan’s National Center of Archaeology and Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St Louis, was made possible with drones and a remote-sensing tool known as lidar, which uses reflected light to create three-dimensional mappings of the environment.

Their research was published in the scientific journal Nature this week, and experts who are not involved in it have hailed its significance in shedding light on the lifestyles of nomadic communities.

The team first discovered Tashbulak, the smaller city, in 2011 while trekking in the mountains. They found burial sites, thousands of pottery shards and other signs that the territory was populated.

Historical records allude to cities in the region, he said, but the team did not expect to find a 12-hectare medieval city some 2,200m above sea level.

“We were kind of blown away,” Mr Frachetti told the BBC.

Even trekking up there was rough, he added, as they encountered strong winds, storms and logistical challenges.

Four years later, a local forestry administrator tipped off the team to study another site close to Tashbulak.

“The official said, ‘I think I have some of those kinds of ceramics in my backyard.’

“So we went to his house… And discovered his house was built on a medieval citadel. He was like living on a huge city,” Mr Frachetti said.

The most challenging part in these discoveries was in convincing the academic community that these cities existed.

“We would say to people that we found this amazing site, and we would get scepticism, that maybe it’s not so big, or it’s just a mound, or a castle… That was the big challenge, how to document this city scientifically to actually illustrate what it was,” Mr Frachetti said.