Mobility of Goods, Ideas, and Technologies in the Oxus Civilisation. Insights from the Adji Kui Graveyard in Margiana (South Turkmenistan)

The Middle and Late Bronze Age necropolis of Adji Kui, in Margiana (southern Turkmenistan) consists of 817 tombs dug both inside the residential structures of two walled villages, Adji Kui 1 and 9, and in the ground between the two fortresses. Unfortunately, numerous tombs have been looted. However, the excavation has also brought to light a large number of intact graves with no signs of looting which have yielded funerary inventory consisting of ceramic vessels, gold, silver, and copper/bronze artefacts, stone tools and other instruments typical of the Oxus Civilization. The Raman and XRD analyses of some metal and stone artefacts conducted in the ISPC Laboratory of the CNR National Research Council of Milan will be presented. These discoveries, here first published, open new perspectives and insights on the mobility of people, goods, ideas, and technologies relative to the specialized manufacturing of some goods in Margiana and the long-distance cultural interactions in the late third millennium BC between Central Asia, the Indo-Iranian Borderland and the Indus River valley.