After our tour around Issyk Kul, our international team was looking at the final stretch of survey before the end of the season. Almost any archaeologist will tell you that some of the most interesting stuff gets found right about the time you have to leave, and this season was no different: with just a few days to go we found some of the most significant building features we saw all season. Under the gun, we mapped and sampled the area just in time.

Running lines in the newly discovered area. Photo by Brad Vest

Why the rush to leave? The weather on the lake seems to take a real turn for the worse in early October, when a fierce west wind called the Ulan picks up. Like every natural phenomena associated with Issyk Kul, there’s a dramatic story behind it:

Long ago, two warriors mythical warriors named Ulan and Santash competed for the attentions of a beautiful woman named Cholpon. Unable to make up her mind, Cholpon instead ripped out her heart. The hill where she died was named Cholpon-Ata (now the popular resort town), and the Kyrgyz mourned her death by filling the valley below with their tears, creating Issyk Kul.

Team member Anatoly discusses a petroglyph on the hill above Cholpon-Ata, where Cholpon allegedly ripped her heart out. Photo by Brad Vest

After Cholpon’s demise, Ulan and Santash became the fierce winds–from the west and east, respectively– that battle each other over the lake every year.

Just as Anatoly was revving up his talk, the Ulan came roaring out of nowhere and nailed us with gumball-sized hail. This photo of team member Maxim was taken only minutes after the one above. Photo by Brad Vest

There’s even a Tamerlane connection to all of this: on the way to a campaign in China, the conqueror had each of his soldiers each leave a stone in a large pile, which would be picked up upon their return, enabling Tamerlane to calculate his losses. (Tamerlane apparently had a thing for piling things up, most notably the reported 120 piles of severed heads crafted after his seizure of Baghdad in 1401). An enormous stone mound in Santash, on the eastern end of Issyk Kul, is allegedly this monument, a testament to the massive losses his army suffered in the east. Archaeologists have quashed the legend by demonstrating that the massive pile of stones is actually the burial mound of a local khan.

Project director Fred (l), Kristin, Vasily and Shamil review final plans for the season.Photo by Brad Vest

But is our team of archaeologists ready to quash the legend that Tamerlane–or one of his descendants–built an incredible structure on the shores of Issyk Kul? In the six weeks that we’ve worked at the site, we’ve recovered a lot of interesting evidence that needs to analyzed and evaluated in our lab back home. We have a massive amount of GPS and remote sensing data to process, and we’re already planning for next year’s return. In the meantime, we’ll keep you posted on any new developments here on the Explorers Journal!

Again, a very special thank you to our supporters who made this expedition so successful: the Seaver Foundation, the Waitt Foundation, the National Geographic Society, Dr. Fred Starr, and Rob Jutson, as well as to our facilitators in Kyrgyzstan, Asia Mountains Travel. Thanks to all!

The team explores a Paleolithic site on the northern shore of Issyk Kul. Photo by Brad Vest.

2,000-year-old burial mounds (kurgans) dot the landscape of a high mountain valley that runs into the lake. Photo by Brad Vest.

Our first stop was the eastern town of Kuturga, where we stayed at a small house on the lake close to the settlement of Chigu, the ancient royal court of the nomadic and powerful Wusun. We planned to dive Chigu, but the steady stream of thunderstorms over the course of two days put a knot in our plans.

Want to know the weather on the eastern end of Issyk Kul? Enjoy the sunshine, and expect a thunderstorm in five minutes. Photo by Brad Vest.

The most important aspect of our trip around the lake was to get a better understanding of what was happening at our site. For instance, we happened upon a modern “brick factory” where residents were extracting clay and mixing it with straw to fashion the sun-baked bricks that are familiar to any archaeologist working in Central Asia.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: Issyk Kul residents craft sun-baked bricks in the same way it was done thousands of years ago. Photo by Brad Vest.

We also visited the site of an ancient Nestorian Christian monastery along the Silk Road believed to be the burial site of St. Matthew, who died along the shore of the lake on his way to India.

Archaeologists don’t only excavate artifacts from the dirt and water: sometimes we have to have to get our vehicles out of the muck as well. At the Nestorian monastery on Issyk Kul. Photo by Viktor Lyagushkin.

And even when the car is running, we may run into the occasional traffic jam... Photo by Brad Vest.

Unlike the verdant landscape of the north coast of Issyk Kul, the southern side of the lake is arid and, in some parts, amazingly reminiscent of the American Southwest. Submerged sites along the southern coast include a city allegedly built by soldiers of Alexander the Great.

Trekking along the southern shores of Issyk Kul. Photo by Viktor Lyagushkin.

We were also incredibly fortunate to be joined by Maxim Menshikov, an archaeologist who often works with Vassily and is currently excavating sites ahead of the 2014 winter Olympic Games in Sochi in the Russian Caucasus Mountains. He has great experience in excavating settlements in the region and is helping us understand the building construction we’re encountering under water. In addition, Viktor Lyagushkin, a leading underwater photographer for National Geographic Russia, and his partner Bogdana Vashchenko met up with us to go diving around the lake.

Following several days of bad weather we were ready for a dive, so we stopped by the submerged settlement of Toru Aigir (ancient Sikul) and were introduced to its remarkable 2000+-year-old underwater remains by Anatoly Kolesnikov, who has been studying the site for 10 years.

Heading out for a dive on ancient Toru Aigir in Kyrgyzstan. Photo by Brad Vest.

Diving over a burial site at Toru Aigir in Issyk Kul. Photo by Viktor Lyagushkin.

It was a fascinating, whirlwind trip that involved everything from trekking high Alpine meadows to diving millennia-old sites, but now it’s time to get back to work at our own site. Maxim and Anatoly have dove in (pun intended) with both feet, and are busy helping to measure and map the enormous amount of construction features that we’re finding.

Maxim and Anatoly document shallow remains at our working site in Issyk Kul. Photo by Viktor Lyagushkin.

We’ll be posting another update soon, but in the meantime have you watched our recent Google+ Hangout?

Although we’re looking at underwater remains, we can use many of the same basic survey approaches that are used on land. Right now, we’re busy running lines to create a map of the site. First, we establish an arbitrary “zero” line to divide the area we’re surveying roughly in half and identify its position using GPS. Then we run 50m-long ropes and tape measures spaced at 3m intervals north and south of this line. We swim the length of these lines while describing the geography of the lake bottom and marking the location of important features on our dive slates. All of these notes are then transferred to a computer program that helps us get a better overall view of the site.

Though it sounds pretty straightforward, running lines takes a lot of prep work. Every line needs to be anchored, so we have to salvage scrapped iron rebar from around our camp and cut it to size. Depending on the area, we may be working in 30cm of water (using snorkels) or 4m of water (with scuba tanks), and all of the rebar needs to be hammered into the lake bottom, whether it’s into loose sand or hard rock. The line is secured to the rebar, then swum out following a specific compass heading and anchored again at the other end. Only then can we document each line with written descriptions, photo and video.

On top of that, we’re busy documenting all of the very important features, such as potential walls, with a handheld GPS and plotting the points on our digital map to see if any consistent patterns appear. And we’re doing all of this while wearing heavy wetsuits and lead weight belts (for stability) in sometimes rough and blustery weather conditions, which means we’re definitely moving a lot slower than we would on land. Then there’s also the time factor of setting up and loading the boat with dive gear and tools and getting to and from the site, as well as wrestling with locally sourced measuring tapes that seem to have a lifespan of about three days in the salty waters of Issyk Kul.

While there’s plenty to see on the bottom with our masks, we suspect that there’s other archaeological material that may be buried under a meter or more of lake sediment. That’s where we rely on Alan, our engineer, who has been managing the remote-sensing work at the site. He’s using a boat-mounted sub-bottom profiler, which sends pulses of acoustic energy into the lake bottom. The echoes of these pulses are transmitted back to the profiler, and the variations in the intensity of these echoes can indicate buried structures that may tie-in to the visible features of the site.

So whether it’s high-tech remote sensing or good old visual surveying, we’re busy every morning and afternoon at Issyk Kul. It’s hard work, but it’s a fascinating site in a beautiful place!

Join the Expedition!

Want to chat with us live in the field? Our director Fred Hiebert will be answering questions in a Reddit IAmA session on Thursday, September 20 at 11am ET, and we’ll also be live from Issyk Kul in a Google+ Hangout at 9pm ET on Tuesday, September 25. Please log on and say hi!

The Issyk Kul Field Team:

Dr. Fredrik Hiebert; credit: Brad Vest

Dr. Fredrik Hiebert is director of the Issyk Kul archaeological project. He is National Geographic’s archaeology fellow and has conducted field work along the overland Silk Road in Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, as well as now in Kyrgyzstan. After almost 25 years of doing underwater archaeology from a boat, he’s finally in the water (and he loves it!).

Dr. Vasily Ploskikh; credit: Brad Vest

Dr. Vasily Ploskikh is the team field director for the Issyk Kul archaeological project. He is the director of the University Museum of the Russian Slavic University in Bishkek and a specialist on the history of Issyk Kul, about which he has written three books. Vasily has been visiting the ancient sites around and in the lake since he was just one year old, and has the amazing ability to identify the most important artifacts hidden among the rocks and sand of the lake bottom.

Kristin Romey; credit Brad Vest

Kristin Romey is the director of field operations for the Issyk Kul archaeological project. She’s worked as an underwater archaeologist on projects ranging from Byzantine shipwrecks to sacred Maya cenotes, and is the former executive editor of Archaeology magazine. Kristin managed to acquire and pack all of the expedition equipment from her tiny NYC apartment with the help of Amazon.com and her long-suffering UPS delivery man.

Alan Turchik; credit Brad Vest

Alan Turchik is a mechanical engineer with the National Geographic Remote Imaging Lab. He has supported several archaeological and scientific expeditions across the globe utilizing the latest remote imaging technology, from the Middle East to the middle of the Pacific. Alan is prized for being able to build the most complex field equipment from as little as a bit of rope and discarded lumber, as long as he has his trusty sawzall.

Shamil Asanov; credit: Brad Vest

Shamil Asanov is the chief field assistant for the Issyk Kul archaeological project. He is a hydrotechnic engineer who has worked on several expeditions at Issyk Kul with Dr. Vasily Ploskikh and has been coming to the lake since he was three years old.

Brad Vest; courtesy Fredrik Hiebert

Brad Vest is the project photographer and a 2012 National Geographic Magazine photography intern. He is an award-winning documentary photographer currently completing a Masters in Visual Communication from Ohio University. His work can be seen at www.bradvest.com.

Dr. Vladimir Ploskikh; credit: Brad Vest

And no mention of the field team can be made without including Dr. Vladimir Ploskikh, vice president of the Academy of Sciences of Kyrgyzstan. He has worked as a historian specializing in the late medieval period since 1961, and has authored numerous important scientific and popular works on the history of Kyrgyzstan and Issyk Kul, which he has been actively studying since 1985. Dr. Ploskikh’s archaeological and historical study of Issyk Kul has laid the groundwork for modern scholarship on this lake.

We’ll be posting later this week on the amazing high- and low-tech approaches we’re taking to examine the site. Stay tuned!

So why are we here? Issyk Kul, which means “hot lake” in Kyrgyz, was a critical location along the fabled Silk Road, with routes running along its shores. Nestled in the largest east-west valley in the high Central Asian mountains, Issyk Kul was renowned in historical documents as a strategic point along the Silk Road that was vied and battled for over the millennia. Countless traders, caravans and nomadic tribes and armies traveled along the 113-mile long lake, leaving a remarkable archaeological legacy behind.

A map of the Silk Road, with Issyk Kul located in the top center of the map. Map courtesy Fred Hiebert.

Since the nineteenth century, Russian scientists and, subsequently, Soviet archaeologists and researchers from the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences have studied the ancient remains around Issyk Kul, which range from petroglyphs and 3,000-year-old kurgans (nomadic burial mounds) to early Christian monasteries and medieval cities.

Zoomorphic petroglyphs (ca. 1500 BC) near Issyk Kul. Photo courtesy Fred Hiebert.

Early on, Issyk Kul also drew attention from researchers for the remains that lie beneath its stunning cobalt waters. It’s an endorheic lake (meaning that it has no outlet) with abundant underwater springs, and the water level has fluctuated dramatically over the centuries, submerging settlements, buildings and even entire cities that had been established on earlier shorelines. Issyk Kul was one of the earliest sites for underwater archaeological research in Central Asia, with divers exploring its depths as long ago as the 1860s.

A 19th-century diver in Issyk Kul. Photo from Vinnik 1959.

In the Middle Ages, the region around the lake was hotly contested by two divergent lines of descendants from Genghis Khan: nomadic, shamanistic Eastern Mongols and the city-dwelling, Islamic Western Mongols. The legendary Western Mongol leader Tamerlane (Timur, 1336-1405) was said to have battled for the lake region in the early 1400s, and there are medieval accounts of palace built by the conqueror on the northern shore of Issyk Kul.

This rumored building has been one of the most frequently cited phenomena in the lake, and a site associated with it was first investigated by a Russian historian, G.A. Kolpakovsky in 1869. A few decades later, the historian V.V. Bartold theorized that the site was associated with the 15^th century palace as described by the medieval Arab historian Ibn Arab Sheikh.

The existence of such a building is of major historical importance, as it would document a critical expansion of Tamerlane’s empire, and the possibility exists that the building was constructed in the style of the Timurid state buildings at Samarkand and Shakhrisabz, as well as the Taj Mahal. If this is indeed a newly discovered Timurid monumental building, it would be a very significant addition to the catalogue of Islamic architecture.

Sky-blue tiles on a Samarkand mosque preserve the ancient tradition. Photo by Gordon Gahan.

Since Bartold first presented his theory that there may indeed be a monumental building associated with Tamerlane in Issyk Kul, archaeologists and historians have repeatedly returned to the site, located near the town of Cholpon-Ata.

In 1926-27 the archaeologist P.P. Ivanov carefully studied the underwater ruins in and made a map, “so that future researchers could not spend too much time searching for their interest.” His work however, was never published and only came to light only in 1957.

In 1959, Dmitri Vinnick of the Kyrgyz Institute of History returned to the question of the nature of the remains and began systematic archaeological survey of the site. He reported regular walls made of brick, wooden beams and blue-glazed tiles of a Timurid type, but ironically, due to Soviet political repression of “Central Asian” history–i.e., finding evidence of Tamerlane’s (a Muslim) conquest of the region–his work was not followed up and he was not allowed to publish on this important finding.

A diver on the 1959 Vinnik expedition to Issyk Kul. Photo from Vinnik 1959.

Since 1985, Professor Vladimir Ploskikh, vice-president of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences, has been conducting underwater surveys and excavations in Issyk Kul, and beginning in 2010 we have partnered with him to explore the history of this fascinating lake, and to finally resolve the question of whether there is truly a legacy of one of the world’s most legendary conquerors beneath its waters.

National Geographic Archaeology Fellow Fredrik Hiebert at work in Issyk Kul; Photo courtesy Brad Vest/National Geographic.

Last year, a small National Geographic team conducted a visual and remote sensing survey of the site, and what we found compelled us to stage a full-scale examination this year. Armed with a toolkit of high-tech remote sensing equipment, along with traditional exploration, diving and underwater excavation, we’ll be spending a month on this beautiful, mountain-ringed lake, and we’ll introduce you to our team and share updates with you on our progress, as well as information on the fascinating history of Issyk Kul and an insider’s look at how an underwater archaeological expedition on one of the world’s highest lakes gets done. Feel free to ask questions in the comments, and stay tuned for our discoveries!

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On Twitter @kristinromey and @fredhiebert

A special thanks to our supporters, both scholarly and financially: the Seaver Foundation, the Waitt Foundation, the National Geographic Society, Dr. Fred Starr, and Rob Jutson, as well as to our facilitators in Kyrgyzstan – Asia Mountains Travel – especially Elena Dudashvili. Thanks to all!