干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

We jointly examine the natural history and the land use history, over the last five thousand years, of the Amudarya Prisarykamysh delta, an area located in the southern part of the Aral Sea region, on the left bank of the Amudarya river. We compiled a series of landscape-archaeological maps for different periods, including the Neolithic Age, the Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modem Age. We suggest that there is a correlation between the timing of irrigation cessation and the current state of landscapes, from heavily salinized solonchaks to clayey takyrs to sandy deserts.