A two-metre-by-one-metre test trench about 700 to 800 metres east of the village of Kumolokli cut through a 60-centimetre-thick archaeological layer packed with pottery fragments and animal bone, and the sherds are Bronze Age. The trench belongs to an October 2026 survey of the Nurata Mountains in Kushrabat district, Samarkand region, that also recorded prehistoric rock paintings in four separate valleys.
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Four painted valleys
Uzbekistan’s Agency for Cultural Heritage announced the results, which HeritageDaily relayed on Oct. 28. The team, A. Kholmatov and T. Ruziboev of the Ya. Gulyamov Samarkand Archaeological Institute, found the rock paintings at Egrijarsoy, Khodjasoy (also called Badimin), Galajinsoy and Sumbulsoy. They were drawn in natural ochre on the walls and ceilings of several rock shelters. The announcement tentatively assigns them to the Mesolithic and Neolithic and says further research is needed to confirm that age, so the paintings carry a wide and unsettled date range.
Ochre art in this range is not new to the archaeologists. The Agency for Cultural Heritage reported in October 2025 that specialists from the same institute, Aziz Imomov and Fozilbek Tursunqulov, had found rock paintings in reddish-yellow mineral pigment, including hand prints and human figures, at the Ko’ktonli Neolithic site in the northern Nurata Mountains. That find was tied to the site’s cultural layers, and similar images were known from Siypantosh in Qashqadaryo region.
Pottery at Pangat and a settlement near Kumolokli
Bronze Age pottery turned up at three locations in the Pangat area, and the trench east of Kumolokli supplies the stronger case for a real settlement. A layer 60 centimetres deep with abundant sherds and animal bone points to people living at the spot over time rather than passing through. The announcement stops short of naming a culture or giving calendar dates.
The wider chronology comes from earlier work. Elise Luneau and Nona Avanesova, writing for the German Archaeological Institute’s blog on a project with Samarkand State University funded by the German Research Foundation, describe Bronze Age burials in shallow stone cists in the Nuratau Mountains, upright stelae on the steppe, and traits linked to Andronovo populations; they call the range the southernmost reach of several such practices. The German team suggests the stelae may have served as orientation or territorial markers and points to parallels with the Eastern Urals and central Kazakhstan, which places the Nuratau Bronze Age inside a network of steppe cultures far larger than the mountains themselves. Settlement debris near Kumolokli would add the living side of that record, since cists and stelae speak mainly of the dead.
Pangat and Kumolokli are also names from older surveys. Samarkand State University reported in 2022 that a team led by associate professor Odil Ergashev, with scientists from the Samarkand Archaeological Institute, mapped Stone Age sites in the villages of Pangat, Kumolokli, Minishkar, Oboi and Shova in the same district, including caves, springs and places where raw stone accumulated. The new survey returns to a landscape already known for much older activity.
The sourcing is thin on one point: the primary announcement from the Agency for Cultural Heritage was not directly retrievable for this report, so the details above follow HeritageDaily’s account of it. The place names, trench measurements and the Mesolithic-to-Neolithic caution all come from that account, and the age of the paintings in particular is stated by the surveyors as unconfirmed.
Sarmishsoy and a range with a long record
The range holds one of Central Asia’s best-known rock-art sites. A cultural-heritage news item on an Uzbek site describes Sarmishsoy, with more than 10,000 images, as the largest petroglyph centre in Central Asia, with open-air museum-reserve status since 2004. Its carvings are assigned to the Bronze Age for animals and hunting scenes, the Early Iron Age for weapons and totems, and later periods for religious symbols and everyday life.
Sarmishsoy shows what repeated attention can do for a mountain valley. Researchers there span an 1834 discovery by Demezon, a Russian army officer, through the Soviet-era classification into three periods by Ya. G’ulomov and Uzbek-Polish and Uzbek-Norwegian expeditions since the 1990s.
A trench of two square metres is a small window onto a settlement of unknown size. What the 60-centimetre layer can already say is limited to its contents: pottery in quantity and animal bone, the usual debris of a household that cooked and ate on the spot. Whether the bone belongs to herded or hunted animals, and whether the layer is a single occupation or several, are the questions a larger excavation would be positioned to answer, and they are the reason the researchers asked for one.
A neighbouring survey the same autumn points the same direction. HeritageDaily reported on Sept. 30 that specialists from the agency and the same Samarkand institute had logged Stone Age sites and about 30 petroglyphs across seven rock faces in Jizzakh region, tentatively dated from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages, again pending further work.
The announcement quotes no one, and neither Kholmatov nor Ruziboev is cited with a statement. Their recommendation is plain: larger-scale excavations, especially at the Bronze Age settlement. The researchers believe the finds could shed light on early settlement in the Nurata Mountains and on cultural connections between ancient communities in the region. Until a full trench opens near Kumolokli, the age of the pottery, the identity of the people who left it and any link to the painted shelters remain open questions.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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