FROM THE TRENCHES
10 ARCHAEOLOGY • July/August 2019THE SITE
Visiting Turkmenistan requires advance
planning, and travelers are encouraged
to sign up with one of the international
tour groups leading trips to Merv. Before
you travel to the site, Williams recom-
mends a visit to the national museum in
the capital, Ashgabat, for an overview
of the history of the region, and to the
museum in Mary, the nearest city to Merv,
which houses artifacts uncovered at the
site. In addition to ruins of fortifications
dating to the Erk Kala and Gyaur Kala pe-
riods, visitors will see the remains of im-
pressive medieval earthen build-
ings called koshks. The largest
of these, the Great Kyz Kala, lies
just outside Sultan Kala’s west-
ern wall, and was likely built be-
tween the eighth and the ninth
centuries as a fortified palace.WHILE YOUÕRE THERE
Take a day trip out to the site of
the Parthian city of Nisa, whichwas occupied from roughly the third cen-
tury b.c. to the third century a.d. Continue
your immersion in the past by booking a
tour to ride the famous Turkmen horses
in the foothills of Kopet Dag, the breath-
taking mountain range that separates
Turkmenistan and Iran.
—Marley brownOver many centuries, a settlement on an oasis along the Silk Road grew into one of the world’s great metropolises. Ancient Merv was
a nexus of commercial goods, languages, ideas, and religious beliefs connecting Europe, Africa, and the Far East. The site was first
settled in the fifth centuryb.c. by the Achaemenids, whose empire stretched from the Caucasus to Egypt. Their settlement, Erk Kala,
was succeeded by Gyaur Kala, which was built by Greek Seleucids under Antiochus I (r. 281–261 b.c.). Over the next millennium, Merv
became a major economic and political center for a succession of empires. By the eighth century a.d., the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate
had established Merv as their eastern capital. They called it Sultan Kala and turned it into one of the world’s largest urban centers. In
the late Middle Ages, maritime trade gradually supplanted the traditional land routes of the Silk Road, and Merv began a slow decline.
The city was devastated by a Mongol attack in 1221, a blow from which it never really recovered.
Virtually all the material dating to the Erk Kala and early Gyaur Kala periods is buried up to 60 feet under the surface. “Realistically,
with our attention to modern stratigraphic excavation, the time needed for such a deep excavation—even if the health and safety is-
sues could be overcome—would make it very difficult to undertake,” explains Tim Williams, director of University College London’s
Ancient Merv Project. However, researchers have used aerial photography to capture the entire site, particularly the remains of the
medieval city of Sultan Kala. Says Williams, “It’s enabled us to understand the layout of the city, down to the detail of individual houses
and buildings, in a way that a surface survey could never do.”
morphed into labiodentals. The addition
of the labiodentals contributed, in turn,
to the proliferation of languages after the
Neolithic, so much so that thousands
of years later, these speech sounds are
present in 76 percent of the several
hundred extant languages of the Indo-
European family. These include most of
the languages of modern Europe, as well
as many of Asia.
The researchers then examined
modern languages and found that
hunter-gatherer languages, such as those
found in parts of northwestern Australia,
Greenland, and southern Africa, use
only one-fourth as many labiodentals as
the languages of agricultural or farming
societies. “Our new research suggests
that a biological perspective is indeed
necessary to resolve why languages have
the range of sounds they have,” says
Moran. Taken together, these lines of
evidence paint a compelling picture of
language diversification being tied to diet.
What humans eat has had profound
impacts on our biological and cultural
history for thousands of years, and will
certainly continue to do so. “I think theresults from this study show that when
it comes to the debate of ‘Are humans
still evolving?’ the answer is clearly
yes,” says archaeologist Suzanne Pilaar
Birch of the University of Georgia.
“[Language] is yet another relatively
recent example that corresponds to
the deep and multifaceted influences
of the development of an agricultural
lifestyle on humanity. We are only just
beginning to understand how complex
and intertwined these sociobiological
impacts are.”
— Lydia PyneOFF THE GRID
ARCHAEOLOGY • July/August 2019MERV, TURKMENISTAN10Ashgabat
Mary MervTURKMENISTANGreat Kyz Kala, Merv, Turkmenistan