Kazakhstan fieldwork

I’m in Almaty Kazakhstan at the moment, where I’ve just finished a stint of fieldwork doing some geoarchaeological survey in the foothills and alluvial fans of the Tian Shan mountains. This is quite a landscape!
I’m working with some wonderful colleagues from Sweet Briar College (Claudia Chang and Perry Tourtellotte), who’ve been working here in Kazakhstan for 20 years. The work we’ve been doing this time is further to the east than where they’ve spent most of their time, and we have been investigating how similar are the landuse patterns and geomorphology across the whole swath of fans and foothills north of the Tian Shan. We also want to investigate further the connection of the steppe lowlands, the farmers on the fans, the foothills, and the upland ranges. This is an exciting project with a lot of future avenues for research! I’ll be posting more thoughts later, but for now, enjoy this fun little google slide show of some photographs I took during the survey.
As a teaser for the slideshow linked above, here’s a panorama of some of the landscapes I’m talking about!

Panoramic view of the Tian Shan and surrounding landscape.

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As always, I’m happy to field any questions or queries about this, or any other topic you read here (by email, or use the comments section below)!