Forgotten antiquities of the Ugam River valley

Abstract

This paper is devoted to one of the urgent problems of modern archaeological research, i.e., to analysis of the discoveries of pre-revolutionary archaeology and to actualization of its achievements. Archaeological monuments of the Ugam River valley (within the territories of modern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where the Ugam River flows into the Chirchiq River) that had been lost during the Soviet times were used as an example. These monuments have literally fallen out of the research interest. The analysis of data available in the written sources on the archaeological findings in the Ugam River basin dating between the late 19th and early 20th centuries enabled us to identify the location of eight monuments forgotten by modern researchers, to map the routes of N.I. Veselovsky (1885) and J.-A. Castagné (1913) – the discoverers of the Ugam antiquities, and to single out two stages in the development of pre-revolutionary archaeology. N.I. Veselovsky described a cave with ancient paintings in red and purple colours, a stone construction, and two tepes. J.-A. Castagné provided data on four caves. The results of our research indicate the need for field archaeological investigations in order to rediscover the monuments that had been found by the pre-revolutionary researchers, as well as to expand the current research focus to the unjustly forgotten antiquities of the Ugam River basin.

Keywords

• archaeology
• rock art
• n.i. veselovsky
• j.-a. castagné
• central asia
• chirchiq river basin
• ugam river valley
• research legacy of pre-revolutionary era