@article {2976,
	title = {Community practice and religion at an Early Islamic cemetery in highland Central Asia},
	journal = {Antiquity},
	volume = {96},
	year = {2022},
	month = {04/2022},
	pages = {628 - 645},
	abstract = {Archaeological studies of Early Islamic communities in Central Asia have focused on lowland urban communities. Here, the authors report on recent geophysical survey and excavation of an Early Islamic cemetery at Tashbulak in south-eastern Uzbekistan. AMS dating places the establishment of the cemetery in the mid-eighth century AD, making it one of the earliest Islamic burial grounds documented in Central Asia. Burials at Tashbulak conform to Islamic prescriptions for grave form and body deposition. The consistency in ritual suggests the existence of a funerary community of practice, challenging narratives of Islamic conversion in peripheral areas as a process of slow diffusion and emphasising the importance of archaeological approaches for documenting the diversity of Early Islamic communities.},
	doi = {10.15184/aqy.2021.106},
	url = {https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/community-practice-and-religion-at-an-early-islamic-cemetery-in-highland-central-asia/4C292A5614CFA03DF5059B1798B70990/share/d72e17180f49f951c611e728fb3634c79f0618ff},
	author = {Bullion, Elissa and Maksudov, Farhod and Henry, Edward R. and Merkle, Ann and Frachetti, Michael}
}
@article {2782,
	title = {Farming strategies of 1st millennium CE agro-pastoralists on the southern foothills of the Tianshan Mountains: A geoarchaeological and macrobotanical investigation of the Mohuchahangoukou (MGK) site, Xinjiang, China},
	journal = {PLOS ONE},
	volume = {14},
	year = {2019},
	month = {May-06-2019},
	pages = {e0217171},
	abstract = {Archaeological evidence emerging over the past decade clearly illustrates that agro-pastoralists living along the foothills of major mountain chains in Central Asia (the so-called {\textquotedblleft}Inner Asian Mountain Corridor{\textquotedblright} or IAMC) facilitated the spread of domesticated grains through their direct involvement in farming. While the environmental conditions across the northwestern slopes of the IAMC provided adequate resources for incipient farming and herding as early as the mid-3rd mill. BCE, the development of local agricultural strategies on the extremely arid and eroded foothills on the southeastern, leeward side of the mountains remain comparatively less studied. Our study tackles this problem by combining geoarchaeological analysis with conventional macrobotanical identification in the investigation of a 1st-mill. CE agro-pastoralist farming site, Mohuchahangoukou (MGK), located on the arid foothills of the Tianshan range. Our results illustrate how ancient agro-pastoralists at MGK innovated irrigation systems both to combat water shortage and, importantly, to trap sediments carried by flood-water for crop cultivation. By synthesizing currently available data, we estimate that they managed to trap about 40 cm of fine-grained sediment within a span of 200 years or even less. These stone-built field systems helped water a diverse stand of crops and create deeper soils in an otherwise deflated landscape with thin desert soils. Since we detected high levels of salt concentration (>2 dSm-1) in the lower portions of all three test trenches we analyzed, we conclude that soil salinization might have affected the long-term sustainability of this form of irrigated field management. We also infer that, besides engineering efforts, the ancient agro-pastoralists at MGK had to resolve the scheduling conflicts between irrigated farming and animal herding through labor specialization.},
	keywords = {Agricultural irrigation, Agricultural soil science, agriculture, Archaeology, Crops, Geochemistry, Paleopedology, Sediment},
	doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0217171},
	url = {https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217171},
	author = {Li, Yuqi and Storozum, Michael and Tian, Duo and Frachetti, Michael and Su, Kai and Wang, Xin},
	editor = {Islam, Rafiq}
}
