Contested landscapes of Soviet Central Asia: an ethnoarchaeological case study from Kazakhstan

ABSTRACT A group of rectangular and circular enclosures in southwest Kazakhstan, originally thought to be prehistoric or early historical, has turned out to date from the 1950s and 1960s. They were built as livestock pens (kora) to protect rice paddies from free-grazing cattle. Rice cultivation had been introduced to the region east of the Aral Sea by deported ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Far East after the native pastoral nomadism had been destroyed by forced collectivisation in the early 1930s. This had resulted in the Great Famine of 1931–33, evidence for which is provided by refugees’ burials found on archaeological sites in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The case study illustrates an approach to the study of twentieth century contested landscapes using evidence from archaeology, ethnography, and oral history. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT