Excavations at Otrar

The base detachment of the South Kazakhstan expedition of the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR continued to explore the city quarter in the southwestern part of the central ruins of Otrar. The excavation covered a latitudinal street and residential buildings facing it with passages. The street is about 50 m long and 2 m wide. In the later layer, the layout of four houses has been revealed so far. Two of them were on the north side of the street and were multi-room complexes with an area of ​​​​about 180 square meters each. House 1 had 15 small rooms in four residential sections. All of them were united by a common entrance hall (4.0x2.5 m) with access to the intra-quarter street. House 2 has 9-rooms. Its four residential sections were located on both sides of a long and narrow corridor (8x1 m), which also had access to the street. Two houses have been cleared on the south side of the street. One of them included three, five rooms in two residential sections. In each area, there are small (8-12 sq. m.) living quarters with a sufa and a tandoor klin, characteristic of the late medieval Otrar, equipped with a chimney. The interior of one room is somewhat different: in the hearth corner of the living room, in addition to the tandoor, there is a fireplace and small niches of different heights in the end wall. In the life of each house, there are several construction periods associated with the need for repairs, redevelopment, and restoration work after fires and destruction.

Horizontal stratigraphy of the 13th-14th century layer recorded the settlement of different quarter parts at different times. The earliest buildings date back to the first half of the 13th century, according to preliminary data. These are isolated areas where life resumed after the Mongol pogrom of 1219. The late medieval quarter - a street with continuous residential buildings on both sides - took shape only in the second half of the 13th century near the walls of some powerful building of the Karakhanid period. The latter remained abandoned for a long time, and, apparently, only in the second half of the 14th century was this site included in the development of the quarter. Later, after a grandiose fire that destroyed almost the entire quarter, a meridional street was laid here. When comparing before and after the Mongolian development, a fundamentally different layout of both the quarter as a whole (the street is laid along the felled walls of abandoned buildings of the 12th century, the direction of the main walls changes) and individual housing constructions of the 13th-14th centuries is observed. A significant number of whole ceramic vessels and metal products, about a hundred coins of the 13th-14th centuries, were found at the excavation.