Our recent Antiquity Project Gallery article introduced Semiyarka as one of the most extensive and carefully planned Bronze Age settlements yet identified on the Kazakh steppe — a 140-hectare landscape including rectilinear compounds, a larger central structure, and unmistakable evidence of organised tin-bronze production. But in many ways, that publication represents only the beginning of the story. Now that Semiyarka is firmly on the archaeological map, our next steps aim to unravel how such an extraordinary settlement actually functioned, and why it emerged in this region around 1600 BC.

^{Drone photograph of the archaeological site of Semiyarka, looking from the south-east to the north-west, taken in July 2018 (photograph by Peter J. Brown).}

This past summer, we opened the first targeted excavations in the industrial zone identified through magnetometry and surface survey. What we uncovered confirms that Semiyarka was not simply a settlement that included metalworking — it was a place where metallurgy shaped the entire rhythm of life. The workshop areas produced a dense scatter of slag, ore, and crucible fragments, giving us a full chain of evidence for tin-bronze production: from raw materials to finished artefacts.

Our current work focuses on understanding the process of metal making, and all its components in detail. We are analysing crucibles, slag, ores, and metal droplets to assess standardisation practices — whether craftspeople followed consistent recipes, repeated firing conditions, and shared techniques across workshops. At the same time, provenance studies of both copper and tin are underway, allowing us to trace the geological sources of the ores and reconstruct how materials moved through Semiyarka’s production system. By connecting these data, we hope to map the supply and circulation networks that brought metal into the settlement and carried finished bronzes outward across the steppe. Semiyarka may be the first large-scale centre in the region where the entire operational chain of tin-bronze production can be studied on site.

Alongside metallurgy, we are also examining how a site of this scale shaped — and was shaped by — its environment. Our team collected extensive environmental samples, including soils, charcoals, sediments, and botanical remains. These will help us reconstruct subsistence strategies to plant use, as well as the potential landscape impact of intensive metallurgy. We are particularly interested in modelling fuel consumption, local deforestation, and carbon capture in steppe soils, which may help estimate the environmental footprint of a Bronze Age industrial centre.

Future field seasons will expand our geophysical coverage, especially around the domestic compounds framed by the earthworks. Excavating these structures will allow us to explore household organisation, storage, craft activity, and ritual behaviour within the settlement. Together, these strands will help us build a clearer picture of how Semiyarka functioned as a regional hub: how people lived, worked, produced, exchanged, and maintained networks across the eastern steppe.

Semiyarka is proving to be one of the most exciting archaeological discoveries of the region in decades — and the work has only just begun. Stay tuned as we continue excavating, analysing, and uncovering new layers of life from this remarkable Bronze Age city of the steppe.

This work is a collaborative project between University College London (UCL), Durham University, and Toraighyrov University, bringing together expertise in archaeometallurgy, landscape archaeology, and regional Bronze Age research. It is currently funded through the DREAM project — Discovering the (R)Evolution of Eurasian Metallurgy: Social and Environmental Impact of the Bronze Age Steppe Metal-Driven Economy, an ERC-awarded and UKRI-guaranteed project hosted at UCL Institute of Archaeology, along with a national Kazakh research grant. The original project was funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust grant. This international support reflects the scale and importance of Semiyarka for understanding Eurasian prehistory.

A major city of the Kazakh Steppe? Investigating Semiyarka’s Bronze Age legacy by Miljana Radivojević, Dan Lawrence, Viktor Merz and Ilya Merz is out now in Antiquity.