Springs in Kazakhstan’s arid landscapes are drawing archaeologists back to the same sites where *Homo sapiens* camped tens of thousands of years ago. The problem is that no one has systematically studied how clusters of ancient springs shaped where people settled and moved across dry regions. Surface water like rivers is scarce in Central Asia, so groundwater seeps were likely critical for survival during the Late Pleistocene, roughly 129,000 to 11,700 years ago. But the link between spring formation and human occupation remains untested because multiple spring-site complexes have never been excavated together. SpringScapes will survey and dig at several recently discovered spring complexes in Kazakhstan, combining excavation with sediment, soil, and chemical analyses to reconstruct how the landscape and groundwater changed over millennia. If successful, the project will produce a new methodology for linking archaeology to water sources in arid zones, and a regional model of how humans dispersed across dry landscapes when water was scarce. This is fundamental science about prehistoric human mobility. It has no immediate practical application, but as Central Asia faces increasing aridity today, understanding how past populations moved in response to water availability could inform future models of human settlement in drying regions.
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The first colonisation of Asia by our species, Homo sapiens, occurred during the Late Pleistocene (ca. 129,000 - 11,700 years ago) and required traversing arid areas, such as Central Asia. Springs are groundwater systems that likely played an important role in the human expansion across these regions, where surface waters, like rivers and lakes, are scarce. However, a general relationship between spring formation and human occupation remains understudied because complexes of several archaeological spring sites have not yet been systematically surveyed and excavated. The aim of SpringScapes is to explore the possible use of spring sites as persistent places of human settlement in Kazakhstan, where several such complexes of different ages have recently been discovered. Specifically, it will 1) develop a new multi-scalar and multi-proxy methodology for the survey and analysis of archaeological sites associated with springs; 2) correlate the timing of the formation of spring sites with that of human occupation; and, finally, 3) provide a regional understanding of human dispersals in arid zones during the Late Pleistocene and their palaeoenvironmental context. SpringScapes will achieve these aims through a combination of survey, excavation, and off-site landscape analysis on the one hand, and sedimentological, micromorphological, and geochemical analyses on the other hand. Using novel methodologies to reconstruct terrain evolution and its relationship to changes in the availability and quality of ground water sources over long time scales, SpringScapes will make important contributions to the study of prehistoric archaeology and to advancing geoarchaeological methods. In our time, as Central Asia finds itself again on the threshold of aridity, SpringScapes will also provide lessons for the future on how to model human mobility as a function of water availability.
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