Excavations of Otrar
The main object of the South-Kazakhstan complex expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR was the late medieval Otrar. An excavation (5000 sq. m.) was laid in the settlement center. It captured the central street in a segment of 500 m. The width of the road was 2–2.5 m. In total, six city blocks were unearthed. Their planning composition does not differ from that which was known from the materials of excavations of previous years. The houses face the entrances to the intra-quarter street. In quarters from six to 15 households. The difference is in the quarter, in which the intra-quarter street rests on a rectangular courtyard with an area of 65 square meters. There were six households around the courtyard. Another quarter is characterized by a larger than usual area of houses and the number of rooms in the house.
There are two types of houses. The layout of the first one is distinguished by the location of all rooms along one line (enfilade of two, three, or four rooms), in the second the rooms are grouped in two opposite each other. In houses, one room is obligatory, with a universal hearth-tandoor. The smoke from the tandoors was removed through chimney channels laid in the sufa and leading to vertical channels in the walls of the premises. The houses had a summer courtyard, the floor of which was paved with burnt bricks. One or two rooms were storerooms; bins are arranged in them, the walls of which are made of brick or adobe. Many irrigated and non-irrigated vessels (khums, cauldrons, teapots, jugs, bowls, plates, dishes, etc.) were found and iron knives, a hatchet horseshoes, and a bronze jug handle decorated with a stylized dragon's head. Lots of carnelian, turquoise and vitreous paste beads. Millstones, pestles, grinders were found. Collected up to 50 copper coins. The date of residential areas is determined by the second half of the 16th-first half of the 18th centuries.
On the Otrar rabad, a late medieval manor was excavated. Its layout is typical for residential development in Otrar. Rooms with a steam tandoor, outbuildings and bins have been cleared. Pottery dates the estate to the 16th-17th centuries. It has been established that life on the rabad stops at the beginning of the 13th century, but some of its sections functioned until the 17th century.
The study of defensive structures made it possible to establish that the contour of the fortress walls of Otrar was more complicated than it seemed based on the study of the topography of the settlement. At least its northern outline consisted of several segments closed at an angle, forming a broken line. The wall was built of brick 38 - 40 x 20 - 22 x 8 cm in the post-Mongolian period.
At the end of 1974, an interesting hoard of silver items and coins was discovered not far from the settlement of Otrartobe (Kzyl-Kum district). It was in an earthenware vessel and included bracelets of several types, rings, various earrings, beads, pendants, hemispherical plaques, details of a belt set (linings, buckle, ring), silver ingots, pieces of bowls, fragments of gilded items and 224 silver coins. More than half of the latter are dirhams of the anonymous coinage of Almalyk, beaten between 638/1240-1241 and 662/1263-1264. The rest of the coins belong to various mints of the Mongol Empire in the 40s-60s of the 13th century (coins of Emil, Pulad, Dzhend, Crimea, Tebritz).