Religion and Spiritual Life in the Bronze Age Murghab Region (Southern Turkmenistan) New Evidence from Bronze Age Terracotta Figurines and Seals

Since 2009 the Italian-Turkmen Archaeological Mission has conducted numerous projects in southern Turkmenistan, as stratigraphic excavations and surface survey, mainly in order to understand how mobile peoples integrated in the broad social arena of the vast open pasturelands and in the sedentary contexts of the Murghab alluvial fan. This region wasdoubtlessly a strategic location for interactions between sedentary farmers and mobile pastoralists in the Bronze Age (Middle and Late Bronze Age - 2400-1300 BCE). The investigation of sedentary villages and mobile campsites from the Bronze Age has allowed a better understanding about what customs and traditions mobile pastoralists may haveborrowed from their sedentary contemporaries and how at the same time they kept intact their own traditions. However, numerous doubts still remain about what kind of interaction occurred between the spiritual life and belief system of each group. Few data regarding this matter were drawn from the excavations of the semi-nomadic sites. On the contrary, artefacts as terracotta figurines, seals and ceremonial vessels detected during the investigations of the Namazga V sites, especially Gonur North and its necropolis, showed how sedentary populations had their own complex belief system. Considered all the shared elements of sedentary and mobile pastoral lifestyles, especially in the material culture, can we hypothesize an interaction in the spiritual sphere between the two cultures? And if this happened, how mobile pastoralists 'reinterpreted' and adapted sedentary customs to their own spiritual life? What were the artifacts linked to beliefs attributed to the sedentary culture that nomad pastoralists decided to take with them during their seasonal mobility? About these questions, recent discoveries carried out between 2014 and 2018 at the sedentary site of Togolok 1 can offer new important answers. The researches led to the identification of three phases of occupation attributed to groups of nomadic pastoralists after the abandonment of the sedentary farming site or at least in a final stage of its life during the Late Bronze Age. An in-depth analysis of the findings documented in these layers will allow a better understanding regarding the everyday and spiritual life of people who lived in one of the most important regions of Central Asia.