Kazakhstan’s cultural heritage has a valuable position in world prehistory

Paula Dupuy, an Associate professor at Nazarbayev University's School of Humanities and Social Sciences, has been conducting archaeological research in Central Asia since 2005.

She studies nomadic pastoralism and runs the International Dzungarian Archaeology Project (DMAP) as project co-director and chief expert. Within this project?Paula Dupuy?organizes an annual summer field school for students on archaeological excavations and research methods.

Can you please tell us about your educational and professional background?

I’m an Associate Professor who joined the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Nazarbayev University in 2016. I received my PhD at Washington University in St. Louis (USA) in 2014, followed in 2015 by a Volkswagen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Kiel (Germany). My research in Kazakhstan was initiated in 2006 as part of a pre-existing collaboration between the National Institute of Archaeology named after A.Kh. Margulan and Washington University in St. Louis. This research focused on ancient pastoralists of the Dzhungar Mountains and their role in early Silk Road exchanges between east and west Eurasia. The year of 2022 marks the 20-year Anniversary of this collaboration, so it is nice to be able to share right now some of what has emerged from this long-term relationship on the Galym-Galam rubric.

Can you please tell us about your current research project?

I specialise in the archaeology of pastoralist and agricultural lifeways, with a particular focus on the role of material culture choices and technology in shaping Eurasian society from the Bronze Age onward (from 5000 years ago). My current research project TEECA [Trans-Eurasian Exchanges: Contemporary Dialogues and Archaeological Enquiry] interrogates the idea that the Central Asian Bronze Age, and its contingent populations, can be generically lumped as a middle ground situated at the crossroads of ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ civilizations.?

Accordingly, one of the aims of TEECA is to investigate the prominence of local community choice and the mixing of different populations in the long-term development of nomadic culture and society in Central Asia. With the aid of scientific laboratory and traditional analytical techniques, the team is investigating the history of social and technological interaction in the two most prominent environmental zones of Kazakhstan: the rolling steppe grasslands as compared to its interconnecting mountain corridors. While the population histories of each area suggest some genetic and material cross-pollination, the impact of those historical ties remain unclear. The TEECA project funds two excavations at ancient settlements and burial sites in the southeast and east of Kazakhstan (for example, in the Dzhungar Mountains and Kokentau foothills) to get beneath the sweeping overviews that sometimes dominate the scholarship of these areas.

TEECA involves a large team effort and includes students, professionals, scientists, scholars and volunteers from within Kazakhstan and abroad. In addition, TEECA takes active steps to preserve the cultural heritage of Kazakhstan’s remote and rural regions through various community outreach, preservation, and training programs. The financial support for the TEECA project has come from Nazarbayev University’s FDCRGP (The Faculty-development competitive research grants program), the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

What are your key research findings?

While our work is ongoing, the picture emerging suggests that socio-economic livelihoods linked to pastoralism, the multicultural cuisine, vast textile and ceramic visual cultures, and mining industry as seen in contemporary Kazakhstan descend from diverse interactions based in long histories of trade, innovation, borrowing and experimentation. While population migration has accounted for some of what we are seeing in the archaeological record, evidence coming from the TEECA project more acutely points to the importance of additional forms of mobility that involved people, animals, technology, and not least of all – things (material culture). Most prominently, in comparing the archaeology of the steppes and mountains, a key finding of TEECA includes the possibility that items such as textiles and pottery moved independently of other quintessential cultural traditions tied to Central Asia (such as herd animals or bread). Preliminary outcomes of the project so far show that material culture belongs at the forefront of debates about the identity and social lives of Bronze Age populations in Kazakhstan and beyond.

Why did you choose to join NU?

Before moving to Nur-Sultan permanently, I spent each summer in Kazakhstan working on excavations both here and in its neighboring countries. Through this routine, I had built both intellectual and personal ties to the region. But, when I was offered a position in the Sociology and Anthropology department at NU, I saw an opportunity to make a longer-term investment within the national scholarship and to invest within the community. I also hoped to make concrete contributions – through being physically present – among the people who first welcomed me to work in Kazakhstan over 15 years ago. This goal has in part materialized through being well positioned to train and involve the next generation of archaeologists through NU student involvement in my excavations, as Research Assistants in the Anthropology Laboratory on our campus, and in seeing them become co-authors on team publications.

What are your future plans?

Moving forward, I am looking for new and productive ways to forge stronger internal and external institutional partnerships and collaborations. From the perspective of an archaeologist, I think an important step must be taken to establish new teaching repositories and research sites on the NU campus to train our own students, but also to provide much-needed laboratory and archive resources for the wider local and international community engaged in Central Asian Area Studies. We have several projects in the works for both archaeology on campus and for the country that will celebrate and bring awareness of Kazakhstan’s cultural heritage and valuable position in world prehistory. And, of course, my plans will and do involve continued and long-term excavations within Kazakhstan, of which I hope the data amassed in the future will contribute to higher resolution and sophisticated understandings of prehistory and its relevance to, and threats incurred by, current day socio-politics and economy.