SIXTEEN LIFE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE: The rural archaeology of the Sapalli culture
INTRODUCTION
This chapter describes the rural facet of Late Bronze Age life in the Sapalli culture. It is based on recent survey work and the results of excavations conducted between 2007 and 2010 at the site of Tilla Bulak in the Pashkhurt plain on the western border of the Surkhan Darya valley (Figure 16.1).
The Sapalli culture, the local northern Bactrian variant of the Oxus Civilization,’ flourished from the 20th to the 15th century BC.2 According to ceramic parallels, it is contemporaneous with the Turkmen Namazga (NMG) VI phase and with all -except the earliest - Bronze Age remains in the Murghab delta.3 In Uzbekistan, it can be divided into two phases, referred to here as Late Bronze (LB) I and LB II. The Late Bronze Age is clearly separated from the following Early Iron Age (the Jaz I/Kuchuk cultures with their distinctive handmade painted wares), which developed from ca. 1450 BC onwards. This terminology requires some explanation: My division between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages follows the initial classification of pottery from Namazga Depe (Ganjalin 1956; Kuftin 1956), which considered the NMG V period as Middle Bronze Age, and the subsequent NMG VI period as Late Bronze Age, without any chronological overlap. Subsequent redefinitions of the Middle Bronze Age have focused rather on social attributes and cultural-historical aspects, such as settlement structure (urban/nonurban), and thereby confused the matter. By using the original relative chronological concept, in no way do we embrace accompanying notions of absolute chronology, ethnogenesis, or migratory history. Furthermore, there is still some terminological disagreement about the final phase of the Late Bronze Age in southern Uzbekistan. This concerns the period between ca. 1700-1500 BC, which includes the successive phases of Kuzali, Molali, and Bustan according to Soviet and Uzbek scholars; it is referred to as LB II by most German archaeologists, and as “Bronze Final” in recent French publications (e.g., Luneau 2014). Its inclusion within the Oxus Civilization was endorsed by H.-P. Francfort, although he considered the dates of 2300-1500 BC “larges et symboliques” (Francfort 2005: 258) and later on consistently used the higher date of 1750 BC for its end (Francfort 2009; Francfort and Tremblay 2010).
The first Late Bronze Age sites of southern Uzbekistan were discovered in the late 1960s, when researchers of the Fine Arts Institute from Tashkent discovered the site of Molalitepa (Beljaeva and Khakimov 1973) and a team from the newly founded Samarkand Institute of Archaeology started excavations at Sapallitepa (Al’baum 1969; Askarov 1971, 1973).4 A few years later, in 1973, A. Askarov began working at Dzharkutan, the largest Sapalli culture settlement (Askarov 1977; Askarov and Abdullaev 1983). Excavations there subsequently continued in cooperation with German (Huff 1995, 2000) and French scholars (Bendezu-Sarmiento and Mustafakulov 2008, 2013; see also Chapter 13). In the Pashkhurt plain, initial surveys did not discover any Bronze Age remains (Rtveladze and Khakimov 1973; Rtveladze 1974), and the first artifacts dated to the 2nd millennium were published only in 2006 (Mokroborodov 2006).
