Upon the open grasslands of what is now Kazakhstan, there once stood a Bronze Age settlement that may have served as a center of exchange and power around 1600 BC.

The settlement — called Semiyarka and nicknamed “The City of Seven Ravines” for its location overlooking a network of valleys — was first discovered in the early 2000s, but it wasn’t until an international group of archaeologists surveyed the area starting in 2018 that its impressive size and potential importance within the Eurasian Steppe came to light. What the team discovered was an expansive area that was once replete with houses, a central monumental building, which may have been used for rituals or governance, and possibly even tin bronze metal production facilities.

Their findings, published Monday in the journal Antiquity, are just the beginning, the study authors said.

“It’s very exciting, because it’s such a rare find to have tin bronze production in this area,” said lead author Miljana Radivojević, an associate professor in archaeological science at University College London, UK. “We know we have hundreds of thousands of tin bronze artifacts from the Bronze Age in the Eurasian steppe and we have only one published site on tin bronze production. And this is the second one.” Tin bronze allowed for sturdier tools and other materials to be made, Radivojević added.

As the team now embarks on excavating the area, they say the continued discoveries of Semiyarka are transforming what we know about urban life in prehistoric Eurasia.

“We just don’t have anything like this at all,” said study coauthor Dan Lawrence, a professor of archaeology at Durham University in the UK. There are hardly settlements of any kind recovered in the steppe, he added. “What you get across this landscape, we associate with mobile pastoral groups, and we think maybe they were in tents or yurts. What we’ve got here is something that’s very clearly quite different.”

Spanning 140 hectares (about 346 acres) above the Irtysh River valley, the large size and strategic location of the settlement may indicate that the Bronze Age steppe had sophisticated cities similar to those located in more urban areas of the world at the time, Lawrence added.

Source : https://www.gov.kz/memleket/entities/mfa-geneva/press/news/details/1109898?lang=kk