Paper abstract:

For more than seven decades, the medieval city of Otrar has been one of the most active archaeological sites in soviet and independent Kazakhstan. However, many scholars examining the history of the site today - archaeologists and historians alike - largely ignore the first systematic excavations of the site undertaken in the late imperial period by the Tashkent-based Turkestan Society of Amateurs of Archaeology. My paper breaks with this tradition and proposes that the archaeological excavations should be revisited.

In this paper I examine 1904 excavations of Otrar in the wider context of turn of the century theories surrounding the ancient past of Central Asia, which by the early 20th century was one of the Russian Empire's most recent, and simultaneously most explicitly-colonial conquests, on the one hand, and the place of nomadic societies in it on the other. I argue that for turn of the century interpreters, Otrar did not materialize as a site of prolonged interest in part because of a conscious decision to interpret "nomadism" and "sedentarism" as a diachronic series of two mutually-exclusive modes of societal organization. Rather than rely on the supposedly-objective new materialist science of archaeology and its evidence to amend existing civilizational taxonomies and narratives, the evidence was made to fit the narrative.