Place · archaeological copper-mining complex · Afghanistan
Mes Aynak
A Buddhist monastic and industrial landscape sitting directly on top of the world's second-largest unexploited copper deposit, forty kilometres south-east of Kabul. Stupas, monasteries, hundreds of clay and schist figures and the remains of ancient smelting have been found together, spanning roughly the Kushan to the Ghaznavid centuries: the monasteries were there because the copper was, and they handled the trade in it. A Chinese consortium has held the mining lease since 2007, so everything since has been rescue archaeology against a deadline that keeps moving.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Tradition
- Mes Aynak archaeology
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 34.000, 69.390
Worth knowing
The monks were living over an ore body and working it — the site has Buddhist buildings and copper furnaces in the same stratigraphy, which is unusually direct evidence that a monastery could be an industrial concern.
Extraction has been repeatedly announced and repeatedly delayed; how much of the site has been recorded, and how much would survive mining, are both disputed.
Connections (4)
- Site adjacencyHadda
The two great Buddhist landscapes of the Kabul valley, about a hundred kilometres apart, and both largely lost in the last fifty years. Hadda outside Jalālābād produced the stucco heads that are the most immediately Hellenistic sculpture the region made, and Xuanzang saw the Buddha's skull relic displayed there; it was destroyed in the fighting of the 1980s and after. Mes Aynak in Logar is being excavated against a mining lease. The valley that carried Buddhism toward China is where the least of it survives.
- AnalogueTakht-i-bahi
Monasteries sat on routes and revenues, not in wildernesses. Takht-i-Bahi looks down on the Mardan plain and the roads across it; Mes Aynak sits on a copper deposit and has smelting furnaces in the same levels as its stupas. Both were endowed by the traffic they overlooked, which is the ordinary economics of Buddhist establishments in the north-west — and at Mes Aynak the relationship is unusually literal, because the monks were living on the ore body and working it.
- AnalogueGaneshwar-Jodhpura
Two copper landscapes whose archaeology is about the metal rather than beside it. Ganeshwar-Jodhpura in the Khetri belt of Rajasthan produced tens of thousands of copper objects from the fourth and third millennia and supplied the Harappan cities; Mes Aynak in Logar has smelting debris interleaved with Buddhist buildings from the Kushan period on. In both cases the settlement pattern follows the ore, and in both the modern mining industry has come back to the same deposits.
- Route adjacencyKābul
Mes Aynak lies forty kilometres south-east of Kabul, on the Logar road toward Gardez and Ghazni, and its Buddhist and industrial phases belong to the centuries when Kabul was a stage on the route between India and Central Asia rather than a capital. The copper went out along the same roads the monasteries were endowed by. When the traffic shifted and the region turned Muslim, both the mining and the monasteries stopped, and the site was left until a mining lease found it again in 2007.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mes Aynak”. Afghan Institute of Archaeology and DAFA rescue excavation reports; Brent Huffman, Saving Mes Aynak (2014), and ICOMOS heritage-at-risk statements.
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