There is a complexity to the evolution of this landscape between the 7th and 13th centuries. Were all the buildings we recognise on the aerial images functioning throughout this period? The line of the city wall, in the position that we see it now, for example, was not constructed until the late 11th century. Before this the demarcation of urban and suburban space probably lay further to the east (Williams forthcoming) (Fig. 34 - opens GIS). Large köshks, of which the Great Kyz Kala was the most substantial, lay to the north and west of the 8th-century city. While a few may pre-date its foundation, this suggests that the new city was encircled with elite buildings, which on the aerial photographs often appear to have associated managed landscapes around them – possibly gardens, orchards and vineyards.
The dating of most of the monuments within this study area is tentative at best, lacking secure stratigraphically retrieved dating evidence. Nevertheless, it is perhaps not unreasonable to suggest that most, if not all, of the principal components of the landscape that we can identify on the aerial images, and on the ground, were functioning around the end of the 11th century: there are no signs of the identified building complexes being superimposed on early structures, and the lack of clear features overlying them might suggest that they were abandoned in the lead up to, or after, the Mongol sack of AD 1221.
© Internet Archaeology/Author(s) URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue25/1/9_1.html
Last updated: Mon Sept 29 2008