Archaeologists May Have Found the Lost Iron City of the Silk Road

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Researchers are uncovering what they think is the metropolis of Marsmanda, an iron-making city that could rewrite the history of the famed trade route

December 2025

OPENER - The Tugunbulak settlement was inhabited between the 6th and 11th centuries.

The temperature hours ago climbed past 104 degrees, and the taxi’s air-conditioning is struggling to keep up. We are barreling across the lush plains of Uzbekistan on a midsummer afternoon. Then, suddenly, we climb into rugged hills, and the driver rolls down his window, sending a blast of baking-hot air into my face. But as we roar up hairpin turns, past vacation chalets, hotels and a pedestrian bridge spanning a deep and narrow canyon, a delicious cool replaces the searing heat.

By the time the pavement gives way to gravel, we are traveling through a landscape resembling crumpled paper. Lonely stands of juniper dot the chaotic jumble of sharp mountain slopes. To the south, flecks of snow glint off the jagged peaks of the Turkestan Range. The only sign of human life is a distant cowboy trotting alongside a herd of cattle.

From a treeless ridgeline road we turn onto a narrow track that plunges into a vertiginous valley. Horses graze along a stream trickling down the steep incline. Soon we pull up beside three shipping containers, placed in a “U” shape, that form the base for an international team of some two dozen archaeologists. In its shaded courtyard, three young volunteers are squatting over blue plastic tubs, washing plain brown pottery shards that were once vessels used by residents of a long-lost settlement that dates to the heyday of the fabled Silk Road.

A panoramic view of the mountains near Tugunbulak, a site around 7,000 feet above sea level, recently connecting newly discovered ancient highland communities to the Silk Road.

One of the volunteers points to a dirt path that vanishes around a bend. Beyond it is an open meadow that rises to a knoll perched above two streams that merge far beneath. The sun is low in the west by the time I reach the top and take in the spectacular view. Some 20 workers, meanwhile, labor with brushes and trowels in an open excavation pit the size of a modest modern home’s foundation—a discovery unexpected for such high altitudes.

“This place doesn’t make any sense,” says Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, stepping back from the lip of the trench as a man in dusty khakis trundles by with a wheelbarrow filled with earth. Frachetti co-directs the dig of Tugunbulak, as the vast area is known, with Farhod Maksudov, who leads Uzbekistan’s National Center of Archaeology, in Tashkent, and Sanjyot Mehendale from the University of California, Berkeley. Frachetti gestures to the nearby hills, pointing to faint straight lines and right angles—tantalizing hints of ancient structures—highlighted in the evening’s slanting sunlight. “This was so monumental—the whole valley is one big archaeological site.”

The sole inhabitants of the area are roving shepherds, only a couple of whom stay to brave the harsh winters, as well as a few farmers who come to cultivate fields in the summer. A thousand years ago, however, impressive walls interspersed with formidable towers enclosed some 300 acres, about twice the size of Pompeii. Yet this site lies at around 7,000 feet above sea level, where a June snowstorm is not unusual and the snowpack can last for more than half the year. Even today, few humans live year-round at such an unforgiving altitude.

Climbing out of the trench, Maksudov picks up a football-size chunk of rock from a large pile. “Here, hold this,” he says, laughing when my face betrays surprise at its heft. “It weighs so much because of the iron pellets inside,” he explains, pointing to the stone’s crimson striations. Miners, smelters and blacksmiths may have converged at this remote site as early as the sixth century A.D. to produce the weapons and tools indispensable for medieval Central Asia. They likely forged swords, arrow tips and horse tack essential to all the great steppe empires, including the Scythians, Huns and Mongols, and presumably made hoes and plows that helped transform marshy lowland oases into productive farmland. These wares radiated out along a shifting network circulating goods, technologies and faiths from Manchuria to the Mediterranean, and from Sri Lanka to Siberia, a network that Ferdinand von Richthofen, a 19th-century German geographer, first described as the Silk Road.

Field co-supervisor Mirae Jo, a PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis, excavates ceramic scatter at Tugunbulak. Jo studies how high-altitude civilizations used artificial water systems.

The detection of a medieval industrial town at high altitude, the fruit of three years of research using high-tech drones and low-tech shovels, is generating excitement among Central Asia specialists all over the world. “To find a city-sized settlement in this highland landscape is entirely a surprise,” Søren Michael Sindbæk of Denmark’s Aarhus University told me when the discovery was reported last year.

The excavation’s leaders are convinced, even as they still are analyzing historical and archaeological data, that the mysterious urban area is the long-lost city of Marsmanda, an iron-producing metro-polis mentioned in tenth-century Arab sources, but which has never been located. It’s a reasonable claim, according to many of their colleagues. More broadly, the discovery lends weight to fresh thinking about how the Silk Road emerged and evolved before sea routes diminished its traffic after the 15th century. The pastoralists who roamed the Central Asian uplands have long been cast as marginal outsiders or mounted predators, ready to swoop down on vulnerable lowland populations. Tugunbulak’s sophistication, however, suggests instead that the region’s mountain residents were an essential part of the lucrative web that came to be called the Silk Road.

Frachetti and Maksudov were not searching for a lost city when they began exploring these craggy highlands. They were looking for traces of Bronze Age peoples who lived in this region some 4,000 years ago. Their quest was unusual; most excavators in the region focus on low-lying ancient trading centers such as Merv, Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand, which are strung like a chain across the region’s vast deserts and plains.

Frachetti, now 50, grew up in Syracuse, New York. When the collapse of the Soviet Union opened Central Asia to Westerners, Frachetti, by then a trained archaeologist, was drawn to a vast region that had been off limits to them for decades. By 2010, he had spent a decade excavating a site in the expansive steppes of Kazakhstan, which neighbors Uzbekistan. There he found evidence that locals were herding sheep and goats as well as the newly domesticated horse at the same time Egyptians were building the pyramids. The ancient Central Asians also were growing wheat from the Near East and millet from China 2,000 years before those grains were thought to have reached the Asian heartland. Long-distance commerce clearly had thrived well before the rise of the classical Silk Road, which dates back to the second century B.C.

Frachetti proposed that Bronze Age pastoralists in Central Asia traveled to high meadows in the summer, where they encountered nomads from other valleys. They arranged marriages, forged alliances, and exchanged food like wheat and millet along with goods such as furs and metal before returning to lower slopes at the end of the brief season. This was repeated across the region’s many mountain ranges, so that local trade links eventually formed loose chains stretching across the breadth of Eurasia—forerunners of the later and more famous network. These ancient pastoralists, in other words, laid the foundation for the Silk Road.

Lead archaeologists Michael Frachetti, Sanjyot Mehendale and Farhod Maksudov at the site in July. They intend to continue their excavation of Tugunbulak next summer.

When Frachetti and Maksudov met in 2009, they quickly identified a shared interest in surveying Uzbekistan’s mountainous regions. Maksudov grew up riding horses in the nearby Fergana Valley to the east, and his father, a soil scientist, introduced him to archaeologists. He absorbed the traditional view that the highlands were places to avoid rather than seek out. “There is an old saying that the river unites and the mountain divides,” he says that evening when we are back at camp. The hungry team members are tearing into two round loaves of hot bread, each the diameter of a bicycle tire, their centers filled with butter obtained from a local shepherd. “We tend to see mountains solely as barriers, but they are, in fact, productive zones, and their upper meadows are important meeting grounds.”

In the summer of 2011, the two men hired a guide and a donkey and set out across the northern ridge of the Malguzar Mountains. Shepherds directed them to a grassy bowl-shaped valley they called Tashbulak, or Stone Spring, that lay nearly 7,000 feet above sea level. Frachetti and Maksudov hoped to find remnants of Bronze Age pastoralists. “When we arrived, we saw thousands of sheep and thousands of bits of ceramic,” Frachetti recalls. The pottery was from the 8th to 11th centuries—about 2,000 years after the end of the Bronze Age, during the peak of the Silk Road.

Excavations uncovered a modest citadel where the elite dined on fine-glazed pottery while wearing glass beads and silver rings. The lower town was crowded with sturdy homes and metal workshops. Scattered spindle whorls signaled the presence of women kept busy weaving textiles from the plentiful goat and sheep wool.

This wheel-spun vessel was uncovered inside a grave at the Tugunbulak site in 2024.

Part of a horse skull was uncovered in a grave next to a human body, offering a hint at religious practices in the region at that time.

Tashbulak thrived from about 730 to 1050 by turning local ores and minerals into weapons, tools and jewelry, while serving as a seasonal meeting place for pastoralists. Residents had a ready market in cities like Samarkand, 5,000 feet lower and 70 miles to the west, where they could buy the grains and fruits needed to supplement a diet otherwise heavy in meat and dairy products. One of the few foods that grows at this altitude is a hardy variety of barley. The town’s approximately 150 buildings may have housed 500 or so residents, though the population likely doubled when pastoralists rendezvoused in the summer to trade, probably pitching their yurts in the spacious open areas within the walls.

When people abandoned the approximately 35-acre settlement in the 11th century, they left behind one of the largest remaining medieval cemeteries known in highland Central Asia, with some 650 burials on the slope of an adjacent hill. Pre-Islamic pastoralists usually buried their dead in widely dispersed mounds called kurgans that typically included weapons, pots and other personal items. By contrast, Frachetti notes, at Tashbulak “the burials are in one place, not scattered on the steppe.” And apart from one exception, the burials were free of grave goods, the tops of the skulls pointed roughly north, and they faced west, toward Mecca: all signs that the dead were Muslim.

Radiocarbon dating pinpointed the oldest excavated burial to about A.D. 720. Around that time, Arab armies were bringing Islam to Central Asia, where people practiced a mix of Zoroastrian, Christian, Buddhist and Turkic shamanic traditions.

Medieval accounts paint a grim picture of extended sieges and bloody battles, climaxing in the Muslim defeat of a huge army sent by China’s Tang dynasty in 751, but centuries passed before Islam dominated the region. The cemetery at Tashbulak hints at the early adoption of Islam outside of the major cities of Central Asia. (The burial containing grave goods indicates that strict Islamic burial prescriptions were not fully accepted by all community members, perhaps suggesting some continuation of pre-Islamic belief systems.)

Yet neither Frachetti nor Maksudov suspected that Tashbulak was little more than a suburb of a much larger and an even older settlement, one that had long lain undisturbed just three miles away.

Among the ancestors of today’s Turks, Uzbeks, Azerbaijanis and other Central Asian groups sharing linguistic and cultural traditions were Turkic pastoralists known for their skill in forging iron. They used the black metal to make needles, plows and sickles, as well as daggers, battle axes, swords and arrow tips, by the sixth century A.D.

Chinese sources note the arrival of Turkic peoples on their border at the time, and genetic studies have yet to pinpoint where this Central Asian steppe population originated. According to a Chinese account, a tribal ruler in the sixth century A.D. insulted a Turkic leader as his “blacksmith slave,” a reference to Turkic people’s role as skilled iron workers serving as vassals to other tribes. This metallurgical expertise likely allowed them to be at the forefront of military technology—including making the first widespread use of iron double stirrups. “With these, you can gallop without using your hands, and fire an arrow,” Maksudov explains. The Chinese feared them as “horse barbarians.” Living in yurts, tending goats and sheep, and cultivating millet, they flourished in the extremes of weather and topography that characterize the center of the world’s largest continent.

After the foundation of the First Turkic Khaganate in A.D. 552, Turkic clans quickly expanded across Central Asia. Within a few decades, they had seized control of the lands between Manchuria and the Crimean Peninsula. Internal revolts and clashes with China’s Tang dynasty weakened the realm, and the last leader’s head was delivered to the Tang emperor in A.D. 744, just as Muslims were making deep advances into the region from the west.

It was during this era of “Pax Turkica” that long-distance trade in silk, silver and enslaved humans fueled the expansion of the Silk Road—as well as the demand for iron weapons and farming tools. Chinese sources mention the proliferation of iron objects, but it is not until the tenth century that Arab geographers provide more detail on the sources of that sought-after ore.

Henry Misa, an Ohio State University historian, has tracked down and translated the handful of references to Marsmanda. When I meet him in Tashkent for dinner, he cites the Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal, who called it “a mountainous city that has no gardens and no vineyards” given the extreme cold. The geographer added that it was known for its “pretty meadows and pastures, blooming [flowers], and beautiful places for strolling.” This description is remarkably like the place today. But it was the site’s iron production, Ibn Hawqal noted, that drew people “from faraway places.” He is vague, however, on its precise location, which scholars have ascribed to various sites as far east as Tajikistan.

Then, in 2015, when the archaeology team was busy in the trenches of Tashbulak, a curious local forestry inspector stopped by to observe the work. “Oh, I have those in my garden,” he said matter-of-factly when he saw members sorting pottery shards. He lived over the next hill, just west of the zone that the archaeologists had surveyed. Intrigued, Maksudov and Frachetti paid a visit. As the forester had said, medieval shards littered his yard. Then they climbed the crest of the next hill. “There it was, laid out in front of us,” Frachetti recalls. Though barely visible, traces of walls extended for what seemed like miles. Locals called it Tugunbulak, or Dammed Spring.

Though the researchers were eager to examine the site in detail, its sheer scale was daunting. The dig’s leaders put off further investigation until they could finish their excavations at Tashbulak. In the meantime, they pondered ways to map a site that was too large to survey using traditional tools like ground-penetrating radar. They were aware that archaeologists specializing in the Americas used light detection and ranging instruments—lidar—mounted on aircraft to peer through dense foliage. By charting even tiny variations in terrain, researchers have been able to spot otherwise invisible ancient Maya cities or Amazonian settlements.

While effective, the method required expensive plane flights, but as drone technology became widely available in the early 2020s, lidar became accessible to Frachetti’s team. “In an open landscape like this, you can get incredibly precise resolution,” he explains. “We could tease out very nuanced lines.” In 2022, the team conducted at least 22 flights over Tugunbulak. “I was skeptical in the beginning, because the site seemed so large,” Maksudov says. “But then we saw the data.”

The resulting map provided stunning detail. The settlement spread over 300 acres and appeared to be made up of four distinct sectors, including one encompassing nearly 52 acres with three distinct fortified structures and hundreds of terraced structures extending between them. When they began to dig in 2024, they chose a large mound on the complex’s northwestern side that appeared to have a heavy concentration of structures.

“We are going to walk up the roadway that leads to the inner city,” Frachetti says one morning as we leave camp. A damp chill hangs over the meadows as we hike past rocky outcroppings on both sides of a broad and grassy path. “This was a boulevard lined with buildings, leading to two gatehouses on either side.”

On a knoll just beyond, the team has uncovered the remains of a large building made of rammed earth—a solidified clay commonly used in ancient China—with walls more than a yard thick. Within this structure they found remnants of large kilns with leftover slag from the smelting process, along with chunks of the juniper charcoal that fired the furnaces. According to radiocarbon results, the oldest level dated to about A.D. 550—just as the Turkic Empire began its expansion. Then, to their surprise, the excavators encountered a pit dug into the structure about a century later, soon after it was briefly abandoned. Within it was the skeleton of a horse with the bones of a human. This was a burial quite different from the simple graves of nearby Tashbulak. The team had stumbled on a Turkic warrior buried with a steed and a host of possessions; only three others like it have been found in this part of Central Asia.

A few days later, in a storeroom at Maksudov’s institute in Tashkent, an Uzbek graduate student rummages in a red plastic crate, pulls out several plastic bags and places the contents on a large white table. Among the artifacts are two small iron arrowheads designed to pierce armor. A third is larger, made of bone, and designed to make a terrifying high-pitched whistle as it spins toward its target, like some medieval buzz bomb. There are two round bronze earrings, two knives, a steel dagger and bits of metal that may have come from horse tack.

The prize find came from a bark pouch at the warrior’s side that had mostly disintegrated, leaving behind three coins wrapped in textile that have yet to be separated. The face of the one visible coin bears an inscription written in Sogdian—“The money of the bearer of the divine blessing”—and a portrait of a long-haired king with Asiatic features, likely minted in the seventh century A.D. The bag also contained a bone pipe, likely used to smoke cannabis, which was inhaled as early as the fifth century B.C.

Maksudov picks up a bronze button stamped with the face of what appears to be a wolf, which he says is likely a Turkic tamga, or clan symbol. “We have an individual buried in a Turkic way.” He pointed to the small and eerily intact skull lying on the table. At 5 foot 4 inches tall, the warrior was either a young man or a woman. “There were female warriors,” he adds, but more testing is needed to determine the sex.

This past summer, the archaeologists opened a new series of trenches on a second mound a hundred yards away. Walking nimbly on a narrow path that crosses the five-foot-deep excavation, Maksudov examines the corner of a nearly nine-foot-thick slanting wall built with large blocks of hewn stone. He confers with Mehendale, who joined the team in 2024. “This is really well built, with a deep foundation that could have carried a second story,” she says. It may even have supported a barrel-vaulted ceiling.

Within several rooms are furnaces, as well as remnants of kilns, some lined with the soft mineral called kaolin used in the production of porcelain and designed to withstand high heat. The excavators had built a huge mound of slag recovered from the dig. While the design resembles contemporaneous military garrisons found in the lowlands, the furnaces point to industrial use. Either the purpose of the building changed, or the metallurgical facilities were considered important enough to protect. “They are living in this pretty precarious environment, off and on, for 500 years,” Frachetti says. “And they seem to have rebuilt this structure two or three times.”

There is no doubt, however, that ironworkers long extracted ore from nearby rock, smelting it at high temperatures to separate the metal from the slag, and then reheating the ore to shape it into the desired form. “The amount of slag and furnace remains is quite astounding for a nomadic Central Asian society,” says Thilo Rehren, a metallurgical specialist at the Cyprus Institute, who is working with the team. “We can now say with assurance that nomadic people were fully capable of large-scale iron smelting.”

Though further analysis is needed, Rehren suspects Tugunbulak may have provided iron for crucible steel production elsewhere and may itself have produced a lower quality steel. The more advanced process of making crucible steel, which Mehendale says was pioneered in Sri Lanka and further developed in India since the first millennium B.C., was unknown to most metallurgists; the method did not reach Europe until the 18th century.

“This overturns the old idea of nomads preying on civilization,” says Misa. “I see instead a hybrid society of farmers, pastoralists, miners and metallurgists.” These discoveries could inform the current debate about the role of nomadism in the period. Remnants of peaches, apricots and grapes in Tashbulak testify to trade with the lowlands. The larger Tugunbulak also puts Tashbulak in a fresh light. “Tashbulak may be a separate community set up by those who converted to Islam and followed different religious practices,” says Frachetti.

Yet who controlled Marsmanda remains a matter of controversy. The nearby lowlands were dominated by Sogdians, who spoke an Iranian language, practiced Zoroastrianism in fire temples, and grew wealthy cultivating fields around Bukhara and Samarkand. They also settled merchant colonies as far afield as the Chinese capital of Chang’an, today’s Xi’an, and played a key role in the Turkic Empire’s bureaucracy. Their city of Zaamin lay less than a three-day journey from Tugunbulak, while bustling Samarkand was only six days distant.

The researchers maintain, however, that while Sogdians surely were around, Tugunbulak was run by a Turkic elite. “This was an autonomous power,” Frachetti argues, noting there are no fire temples but plentiful signs of a Turkic presence. “These mobile communities chose a place that can access lowland markets.”

Other scholars are skeptical. Sören Stark, a New York University archaeologist who has long excavated in Uzbekistan, suspects the site was dominated by Sogdians who hired Turkic mercenaries to protect the valuable metallurgical center from attack. Particularly after the collapse of the first Turkic Empire in the seventh century, these warriors “would be seeking new employment, and it makes sense they would seek out richer neighbors.”

Whoever ruled the settlement, its prosperous centuries came to an end by about A.D. 1050, when it was largely abandoned. Frachetti says other factors may have been at play, including a disastrous drought, deforestation of the wood needed to make charcoal or competition from other iron sources. “Some combination may have turned this into the medieval version of an American Rust Belt city,” he says.

Researchers uninvolved in the project agree that the team has likely solved the riddle of Central Asia’s lost city of medieval ironsmiths. “There is no disputing this is Marsmanda,” acknowledges Stark. Sindbæk, of Aarhus University, says “this is definitely a site with the potential to rewrite the history of Central Asia.” The discovery is sure to encourage a reassessment of pastoralists so often painted as barbaric and destructive by the urban peoples who created much of the contemporary written record. And it strengthens Frachetti’s theory that ancient herders not only laid foundations for the Silk Road, but were also central to its later evolution into a full-fledged international trade network.

On the last full day of the dig season, everyone is busy washing and sorting piles of pottery and cataloging the most important finds. Frachetti and Maksudov take a brief coffee break to muse over what Marsmanda might reveal. “Nomadic urbanism seems a paradox,” the American says. “But there wasn’t necessarily an antagonistic relationship between lowland and highland groups.”

Maksudov agrees. “We used to see this clear separation between settled people and pastoralists, But here”—he gestures to the brown hills with their traces of walls—“the two are integrated. There is a symbiosis, and they are doing it in a unique way.”

The researchers intend to return in the summer of 2026 to excavate a densely built mound located near the center of the complex that the archaeologists hope may reveal the administrative center of the city. Until then, they are busy analyzing the finds from the last two seasons. “Time and science will tell the story more fully,” Frachetti says, “and it will certainly be more complicated than we think today.”