Archaeologists Find Evidence of a Bronze Age City in Kazakhstan

Surveyed for the first time since its discovery two decades ago, the settlement “breaks from all the things that we thought we knew about Central Asia up to this point,” a study author says

Mary Randolph - Staff Contributor

November 24, 2025 1:54 p.m.

To survey the area, researchers used a mix of satellite imagery and magnetometry. Peter J. Brown / Antiquity

Twenty years after its discovery, archaeologists are finally revealing the secrets of Semiyarka, a Bronze Age settlement in Kazakhstan that may have been a center of exchange and power around 1600 B.C.E.

The settlement, also known as “The City of Seven Ravines,” was found in the early 2000s, but archaeologists didn’t begin a major survey of the site until 2018. In a study published last week in Antiquity, the team of archaeologists shared the findings of the survey.

The most important discovery is that an urban center like Semiyarka existed in a society previously thought to be nomadic, writes Miljana Radivojević, lead author and an archaeologist at University College London, in a statement.

“This is one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries in this region for decades,” she says. “Semiyarka changes the way we think about steppe societies. It shows that mobile communities could build and sustain permanent, organized settlements centred on a likely large-scale industry—a true ’urban hub’ of the steppe.”

Though archaeologists originally believed the settlement was around 100 acres, the new research estimates its area at around 350 acres. In their survey, which was only conducted on the surface level, the archaeologists found evidence of houses, a central monumental building, pottery and a possible tin bronze production site.

The latter, Radivojević tells CNN’s Taylor Nicioli, is especially exciting for researchers of this time period.

“We know we have hundreds of thousands of tin bronze artifacts from the Bronze Age in the Eurasian steppe and we have only one published site on tin bronze production," she ways. "And this is the second one.”

Quick fact: Where is Semiyarka?

• The 3,500-year-old settlement is located on the Irtysh River in Abai Oblast, Kazakhstan, about 110 miles southeast of Pavlodar.

The survey involved studying satellite imagery in 50-square-meter areas, Corona spy photography from the past 60 years, and magnetometry, which allows archaeologists to see buried parts of the settlement without digging.

“Magnetometry was crucial,” Radivojević tells Vittoria Benzine of Artnet News. “It revealed the formal layout of the domestic compounds, confirmed the large scale of the earthwork-bounded structures, and showed us details impossible to identify from the surface alone.

It is one of the main reasons we can confidently describe Semiyarka as a formally planned settlement rather than a loose cluster of occupations.”

Though it was discovered two decades ago, archaeologists did not have resources to begin surveying the area until 2018. Building on work from Viktor Merz of Toraighyrov University, who initially discovered the site and is a co-author on the new research, Radivojević and her team secured funding from three U.K. and Kazakh grants, reports Artnet News.

Though not included in the published study, the team has already begun its excavation of the site and made more discoveries, Radivojević tells CNN*.*

Other archaeologists, though, are not convinced that Semiyarka was a major urban settlement.

“The results, at least those presented in the article, would suggest a strong ‘NO’ to that question, especially given the low-density pottery sherd scatter on the surface and seemingly equally low-density evidence for metallurgy,” James Johnson, an archaeologist and assistant instructional professor in anthropology at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, tells CNN, adding that “cities are spatial and demographic entities that usually represent the complex interplay of the built environment, population density and sprawl, and material culture (as well as numerous other sociological factors).”

Co-author Dan Lawrence, an archaeologist at Durham University in the U.K., tells CNN that much remains unknown about the site. He considers it a city, though, “in the sense that it is very different from surrounding settlements.”

“This site is super interesting because it just breaks from all the things that we thought we knew about Central Asia up to this point,” Lawrence says. “And so understanding how that got there, why that got there, and then how it connects to these much larger stories is really interesting, and it’s not something we can answer yet, but now we know the site’s there, we can start to develop a program to try and understand what it all means.”

You Might Also Like

• November 24, 2025

• November 24, 2025

• November 24, 2025

• November 24, 2025

• November 21, 2025

• More about:

• Archaeology

• New Research