Cultural Variability in the Bronze Age Oxus Civilisation and its Relations with the Surrounding Regions of Central Asia and Iran

In S. Salvatori and M. Tosi (eds.) The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in the Margiana Lowlands: Facts and Methodological Proposals for a Redefinition of the Research Strategies (British Archaeological Reports. International Series 1806). — Oxford, 2008. — pp. 75-98.The remarkably vast spread of the Oxus Civilisation, which encompassed, starting from the Middle Bronze Age, the piedmont of southern Turkmenistan (Altyn-depe, Namazgadepe, etc.), the delta and lower reaches of the Murgab, the Margiana of the classical period, the regions of Uzbekistan and southern Tadzhikistan on the Amudar’ya, the righthand tributaries of this river, and northern Afganistan (oases of Daulatabad, Dashly, Nichkin and Farukhabad), needs to be studied in a carefully-focused, specific way. The purpose of this essay is to analyse – on the basis of the currently available archaeological documentation, with all its countless collection and publication limits – the convergences and differences within this cultural system during the Middle Bronze and Late Bronze Ages, in other words – in terms of an absolute chronology based on a still-too-limited number of radiocarbon determinations – between the middle of the third millennium BC and the middle of the second. At the same time, we will also endeavour to outline a picture of the relations that this Asian civilisation had with the Iranian plateau (including the alluvial plains of south-western Iran and the overall Elamite world), the Indus Valley, Baluchistan and the regions of the Arabian Peninsula that face the Gulf.