Abstract
Last decades witnessed to a rapid growth in amount of archaeological data of various types available for study of past societies' economy in southern Central Asia. Extensive surface surveys and their results allow now for preliminary conclusions concerning settlement pattern, water management systems, and centralisation in early historic periods.
They allow, too, for speculations on possible motives of prehistoric societies in their spread eastwards and upwards in Bactria connected with search for natural resources. It is obvious now that the growth of population and emergence of proto-urban centres in Bactria was indeed related to construction of large-scale artificial irrigation systems and other sophisticated approaches to sedentary agriculture.
Complementarily to these quantitative data, recent excavations of both prehistoric and early historic settlements and special analyses of material culture add some qualitative data on exchange and dispersal of knowledge and technologies (of grain processing, for instance) indirectly confirming increasing harvest yields after the turn of our era. What we still lack, it is sufficient paleo-environmental data, including relevant meteorological data sets, which would allow for complex reconstruction of the past landscapes and their dynamics in the diachronic perspective.
This paper aims to postulate some hypotheses on economic functioning of past societies in southern Central Asia based on fresh archaeological data from the region that will necessarily need to be proven by further paleo-environmental studies.