Event: WEDS TALKS:Sogdiana's Hellenistic Borderlands: mapping landscapes of power through remote sensing in Western Uzbekistan

ABSTRACT: This talk presents preliminary results of ongoing archaeological research in the Kyzylkum Desert outside of the Bukhara Oasis in western Uzbekistan. From the mid-1st millennium BCE through 1st c. CE parts of the Kyzylkum desert were a vast agricultural oasis sustained by rivers and substantive canal networks, constituting the westernmost extent of ancient Sogdiana. After the arrival of Greco-Macedonians with Alexander of Macedon western Sogdiana experienced substantial intensification that reached its crux under the archaeologically elusive Kangju empire at the turn of the 1st millennium CE. Then substantial rural areas were rapidly abandoned. Through an ongoing, broad remote sensing survey parts of this vast, now arid agricultural oasis is beginning to emerge. These new data allow us to assess for the first time the broader ecological effects of decision-making in Central Asia’s rural frontiers during the Hellenistic and Post-Hellenistic Periods, and the role these ancient anthropogenic processes played in the formation of the modern Kyzylkum.

BIO: Zach Silvia is a landscape archaeologist focused on the impact of asymmetrical power on ancient culture and ecology in colonial and imperial contexts. At present his work focuses on two geographic contexts: ancient Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic Sogdiana (especially in the Kyzylkum desert around the Bukhara Oasis of Uzbekistan) and late Iron Age and early Roman Istria in Croatia. In both regions he explores the human effects of ecological change on rural communities enduring, appropriating, and resisting various types of colonial systems. He is also a specialist in aerial and terrestrial based remote sensing methods with a strong interest in ethical applications of non-destructive approaches to archaeological fieldwork. Zach received his Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 2022. Zach was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Spatial Archaeometry and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College (2022-23) as well as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University (2023-25).