The latest issue of Lidé a Země (1/2026) features a new popular-science article entitled “Starověké železářství a zaniklá krajina v horách Střední Asie: tam, kde plál oheň pod horami (Ancient Iron Production and a Vanished Landscape in the Mountains of Central Asia: Where Fire Once Burned Beneath the Mountains), authored by Atilla Vatansever and Lenka Lisá. The article takes readers to south-western Kyrgyzstan, into the mountainous landscape surrounding the village of Ravat, where traces of centuries-old iron extraction and smelting still lie hidden beneath today’s pastures and ravines.
The text is based on long-term field research conducted by members and collaborators of the Central Asian Research Society (CARS). Written in an accessible yet intellectually rigorous manner, it demonstrates how archaeology, geoarchaeology and environmental sciences can be used to read the landscape as a historical archive. Layers of ash, slag, charcoal and fragments of ceramic tuyères reveal the presence of furnaces, workshops and working spaces that once shaped both the local economy and the surrounding environment.
At its core, the article explores a lost industrial landscape—a place where iron was smelted from at least antiquity onwards, where fortresses of Central Asian khanates once guarded production sites, and where branches of the Silk Road connected local metallurgy to interregional trade networks. Ravat emerges not as a marginal settlement, but as a key node within a broader system of production, exchange and long-term environmental transformation.
At the same time, the article illustrates that archaeology is not merely concerned with isolated finds, but with the long-term relationship between people and their environment. The fires of the furnaces, the cutting of forests for charcoal, the extraction of ore and the eventual abandonment of production left durable traces in the landscape—traces that remain visible today to those who know how to recognise them.
The publication of this article in Lidé a Země represents an important step for CARS in communicating the results of Central Asian research to a wider audience. It reflects the society’s broader mission: to combine high-quality field research with public engagement and the protection of cultural heritage in Central Asia.
