Lost Silk Road cities were just discovered with groundbreaking tech
Scientists were surprised to find a medieval metropolis atop mountains, providing new insights into life along the ancient trade route. “This changes everything we thought we knew.”
Researchers have discovered the remains of medieval cities perched above the ancient Silk Road in the rugged mountains of southeastern Uzbekistan. One of them is a sprawling, high-altitude metropolis that lay hidden for centuries, in a place where few expected to find signs of ancient civilizations.
The discovery, made possible by new drone-based lidar technology, challenges long-held assumptions about urban life in the remote mountains of Central Asia more than a thousand years ago.
The groundbreaking research, led by National Geographic Explorer Michael Frachetti and Farhod Maksudov, director of Uzbekistan's National Center of Archaeology, reveals a bustling city that thrived between the 6th and 11th centuries. Situated at altitudes reaching up to 7,200 feet (comparable to Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes), this discovery sheds new light on the complexity, scale, and elevation of medieval societies along the Silk Road, the vast network of ancient trade routes that connected Europe and Eastern Asia.
The ruins of the ancient city of Tugunbulak cover nearly 300 acres, making it one of the largest regional settlements of its time, according to a paper published today in Nature and based on research funded by the National Geographic Society.
“Lidar showed us that there’s a massive city there, hiding in plain sight,” says Frachetti, associate professor of anthropology at Washington University, St Louis. “It allowed us to approach this huge landscape in a way that lets you appreciate the scope and scale of the place, with stunning detail.”
About three miles away, a smaller, densely built city called Tashbulak was also surveyed by lidar, a remote sensing method that uses reflected light to create detailed 3-dimensional maps.
(Lidar is changing everything we know about the Maya.)
Living it up on top
It's hard to picture cities of this size thriving in a snow-covered, wind-battered environment where even today, only a handful of nomadic herdsmen venture. The long winters, steep cliffs, and rugged terrain made large-scale farming nearly impossible at such high altitude—a fact that may explain why historians and archaeologists mostly overlooked this remote region for so long.
But Frachetti’s team believes these highland urban centers weren’t just surviving, they were thriving—in ways that defy expectations of what medieval mountain societies were capable of.
Both Tashbulak and Tugunbulak feature multiple permanent structures and sophisticated urban designs, seemingly crafted to make the most of the mountainous terrain. The high-resolution lidar images offer detailed views of the houses, plazas, fortifications, and roads that shaped the lives and economies of these highland communities. The larger of the two, Tugunbulak, boasts five watchtowers linked by walls along the ridgelines, as well as a central fortress protected by thick stone and mud-brick walls.
Why so high?
Large urban centers have historically been uncommon in high-altitude regions. The most famous examples—Machu Picchu, Cusco, and Lhasa—are often viewed as exceptions and remarkable examples of human resilience in extreme conditions.
But Tashbulak and Tugunbulak’s location may have been chosen to harness strong mountain winds to fuel high-temperature fires needed to smelt metallic ores. Limited excavations have revealed what appears to be a production kiln—likely a workshop where ancient smiths transformed the region's rich iron deposits into swords, armor, or tools.
“We need to investigate more, but we have a very strong sense that a major portion of the site was oriented around productive activities, smelting or other sorts of pyrotechnology,” Frachetti says. “By mid-morning, the ground heats from the sun, and then you get a natural convection system with a long, hard wind that blasts up the mountainsides—a perfect condition for metalworking.”
The researcher suspects that Tugunbulak’s economy was driven by blacksmithing and other metalworking industries, capitalizing on the materials around them and their proximity to the Silk Road.
“Iron and steel were the resources that everybody wanted, along with horses and warriors,” Frachetti says. “This was an age with a lot of rapid change, when everyone needed power to survive. These were the oil fields of the middle ages.”
(The surprisingly simple origins of the Silk Road: trading silk for horses.)
‘New Kid on the Block’
For centuries, Silk Road historians have focused on the nomadic tribes and lowland empires that dominated the Uzbekistan region, often painting the highlands as marginal or peripheral to life in the valleys below. But the existence of extensive urban centers suggests that the mountains were home to their own distinct societies, with complex economies, political systems, and cultures.
The new discoveries raise the possibility that highland urbanism wasn’t an anomaly in Central Asia, but part of a broader, more complex picture of medieval life. “This puts a very big political entity at high altitude, in a zone that's outside of the normal agricultural realm, where you wouldn’t expect to find a city of this size,” says Frachetti.
Further research will shed more light on who these people were, but it’s already clear that they developed their own ways of life, separate from the typical agricultural societies of their time.
“If what we’re discovering is a highland political realm that’s differentiated from the lowlands, then it paints a very different picture of who the players were in medieval Central Asia,” Frachetti says.
“If we’re right, we’ve got a new kid on the block,” says Frachetti. “These people weren’t the barbarian horse-riding hordes that history has often painted them as. They were mountain populations, probably with nomadic political systems, but they were also investing in major urban infrastructure. This changes everything we thought we knew about Central Asian history.”
