Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Photography: Exploring the Medieval City of Merv, on the Silk Roads of Central Asia

6th century BCE, probably as part of the expansion into the region of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Lying on one of the main branches of the ancient Silk Roads, which connected Europe and Africa to the Far East, a succession of cities flourished. By the early medieval period these encompassed over 1,000ha (Fig. 1). The great Islamic city of Sultan Kala, capital of the eastern Islamic world, was perhaps the third largest city in the world in the mid-12th century CE (ChaseDunn and Willard, 1993; Chandler, 1987). Sacked by the Mongols in 1221 CE, it never recovered, by-passed by the changing patterns of world trade; while later cities developed nearby, the medieval city had little subsequent disturbance. What this has left us is one of the greatest urban archaeological sites of the world. With between 4–17m of complex archaeological stratigraphy, uninterrupted over the 1,000ha, there are upwards of 50 million cubic metres of archaeological deposits. These start almost immediately below the surface, with stunning preservation, particularly of the 10thto 13th-century phase of the city (Fig. 2). Today, however, little is visible on the surface, but there is a legible medieval urban landscape – not from the ground, but from the air (see below). One of the aims of the Ancient Merv project is to produce an Atlas of Islamic Merv, an interpretation of the city of Sultan Kala and its suburbs from about the 8th-13th centuries CE (Williams, 2007a). Characterising and understanding the spatial organisation of early Islamic cities represents a major challenge for archaeologists and historians, especially as many of the medieval cities of the Islamic world are buried by later urban communities, leaving us to extrapolate from much later urban forms. Merv offers a rare opportunity to explore the nature of an early Islamic city, especially its flourishing under the Seljuks (cf. the scale and clarity of the material from Samarra, over a much shorter period: Northedge, 2005; forthcoming). This part of the project Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Photography: Exploring the Medieval City of Merv, on the Silk Roads of Central Asia