Shashtepa

Subsequent searches in the Shashtepa area unearthed similar items, leading to the discovery of Burgulyuk settlements along the shores of the Tashkent Sea. Earthen dwellings washed away by water, containing pottery, grain remnants, animal bones, and household items, further confirmed the agricultural nature of these groups.

The inhabitants of this culture settled near the Jun stream, where the water’s surface was almost level with the banks, facilitating irrigation of the fields. These early farmers lived in semi-subterranean dwellings with framed walls and light coverings.

Each dwelling, equipped with a hearth and pits for grain storage, housed a single family. The residents used round-bottomed clay pottery, handcrafted on cloth templates, which they painted and fired. The Burgulyuk people cultivated barley and soft wheat varieties, tilling the land with stone hoes and harvesting with bronze sickles. They ground the grain into flour using stone querns. The inhabitants of the Shashtepa settlement also engaged in domestic animal husbandry, breeding cattle, sheep, and pigs. Horses, donkeys, and camels were used in their economy. In stone molds, the Burgulyuk people cast knives, sickles, arrowheads, and other items from bronze. They also began to work with iron, producing tools. Weaving was widely developed, producing both fine and coarse woolen fabrics from sheep’s wool and jute fibers. There is no evidence of cotton fiber use during this period. The Burgulyuk people worshipped the forces of nature and fertility, living in a society at the stage of patriarchal-communal relations.

Margarita Ivanovna Filanovich, the head of the Tashkent archaeological squad, states: «The significance of the Shashtepa research for science lies in the discovery of the Burgulyuk culture in its lower cultural deposits at a late stage of development; secondly, thanks to the continuous stratigraphy, one can observe the gradual change of cultures, seeing how the Burgulyuk culture, under the influence of neighboring tribes’ cultures, is replaced by the Kaunchi culture. Now there is no need to search for the homeland of the Kaunchi culture.»

This has allowed for a more precise determination of the temporal boundaries of the settled-agricultural culture. Archaeologists date its early stage to the 9th-7th centuries BCE. By this time, many areas of Central Asia had already discovered foci of ancient agricultural cultures, characterized by the production of painted pottery, i.e., the decoration of everyday vessels with red geometric ornamentation, dated to the end of the second and beginning of the first millennium BCE.

At this site, a ring-shaped defensive wall was discovered. Constructed from raw brick alternating with a layer of pakhsa (clay), it measures over four meters in width, three meters and sixty centimeters in height, and extends for 60 meters. Archaeologists believe that this wall stood for a long time and was rebuilt several times. As scholars note, it was built according to all the rules of fortification art and is undoubtedly evidence that the first experiments in urban planning in Tashkent can be dated to no later than 2200 years ago.