Archaeological Survey along the Karatyube Piedmont, Samarkand. Preliminary Result of the Field Seasons of the Uzbek-Italian Archaeological Project (UIAP) 2019 and 2021

The paper presents the result of the field survey carried out in the Karatyube oothill during the 2019 and 2021 campaigns of the Uzbek-Italian Archaeological Project 'Samarkand and Its Territory'. The investigation encompassed the piedmont area (750-1000 m asl) between the villages of Egrikul and Mirankul, Southwest of the city of Samarkand. Thanks to a systematic fieldwork, and the use of the Android App QField for QGIS, the survey resulted in the identification of ca. 150 new archaeological sites. Most of them belong to low stone mounds used for funerary purposes (kurgan) and found either single, double, or clustered together. Such a large presence of funerary sites here suggests that the Karatyube piedmont was used for a long time as a preferential place for burials, not only by the communities living in this area but also for those living in the irrigated plain, where kurgans are few and multi-layered settlement mounds (tepa) abound.