Funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities will expand access to the collections while enabling Texas A&M Anthropology to move toward becoming a state-certified repository complete with digitized materials.

A team of researchers led by Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, and Farhod Maksudov, director of the National Center of Archaeology in Uzbekistan, used drone-based lidar to map the archaeological scale and layout of two recently discovered high-elevation sites in Uzbekistan. The medieval cities are among the largest ever documented in the mountainous parts of the Silk Road, the vast network of ancient trade routes that connected Europe and Eastern Asia. Images and details of the discovery were published in Nature.