Nomadic Heritage
Cultural expeditions across Kazakhstan and Central Asia focused on archaeology, Silk Road history, sacred landscapes, nomadic traditions, and the living heritage of the Great Steppe.
Cultural partnership
Dala Arba Expeditions works in close collaboration with the Ostrov Krym Scientific Restoration Laboratory — one of the world's leading centres for archaeological restoration and reconstruction.
Founded by Krym Altynbekov — one of Kazakhstan's most distinguished restoration artists and archaeologists — the laboratory is internationally recognised for the reconstruction of the Golden Man, one of Kazakhstan's most important national symbols.
For more than thirty years, the laboratory has saved several thousand archaeological artefacts, developed new methodologies of conservation and restoration, and produced dozens of full-scale reconstructions of nomadic costumes, ceremonial horse equipment, and ritual objects from the burial mounds of the Saka and Sarmatian world.
Its work extends to the restoration of Silk Road heritage sites, mausoleums, archaeological artefacts, nomadic armour, ceremonial horse equipment, and cultural treasures connected to the civilizations of the Great Steppe.
30+
Years of practice
1,000s
Artefacts saved
Dozens
Full reconstructions
Only one
In Central Asia
01 — Saka & Ancient Civilizations
A thousand-year chain of burial mounds rises across Kazakhstan from the Tien Shan foothills to the Altai — and what the steppe held in life still lies inside them.
Between the 8th and 3rd centuries BC, the Saka — Iranian-speaking horse-rider nomads of the Eurasian steppe — built the kurgans that still mark the landscape from Semirechye to the East Kazakhstan highlands. The mounds hold gold, weapons, horses, and the men and women who rode them.
We design routes that move between active dig sites, the laboratory reconstructions in Almaty, and the museum collections — accompanied by archaeologists and curators who have worked these sites for decades.
Discovered in 1969 sixty kilometres east of Almaty: a young Saka warrior in a costume of more than 4,000 gold pieces, with a seventy-centimetre pointed headdress crowned by a winged mythical beast.
Wooden burial chambers sealed by permafrost. Excavated by Zainolla Samashev from 1998 onward — gold-leafed harnesses, ritual headdresses, and the mummified horses that accompanied their riders.
An ongoing programme of excavation has opened dozens of burial mounds and settlements of the Saka-Scythian period in the Tarbagatai and Altai foothills — among the richest Iron Age complexes in Eurasia.
02 — Silk Road Routes
Not one road, but a network of corridors that ran for more than a thousand years — through the foothills of the Tien Shan, the oases of the south, and along the long frontier of the Syr Darya.
Sixteen archaeological sites along the Syr Darya — Otrar, Sauran, Sygnak, Zhankent and others — have been placed on Kazakhstan's UNESCO tentative list as part of the Silk Roads programme. The cities at the centre of the route have been ruins for half a millennium, but they still hold the marks of what made the route possible.
Our routes follow these corridors through working pilgrimage sites, ruined caravanserais, and the cities that grew up where the routes converged — moving slowly, with historians who can read the layers.
Commissioned by Tamerlane in 1389 over the tomb of the great Sufi poet. UNESCO World Heritage Site (2003). Considered by many Central Asian Muslims the most important pilgrimage destination after Mecca and Medina.
The trigger of the Mongol invasion of Central Asia: Otrar's governor seized a Mongol caravan in 1218; the city was sacked in 1219. Excavations of the citadel and the surrounding oasis continue today.
Double walls, fifteen-metre minarets, capital of the Ak-Orda khanate. One of the few Silk Road cities to escape Mongol destruction. Abandoned around 1515 and never rebuilt.
03 — Petroglyph Landscapes
From the Middle Bronze Age around 1500 BC through the Saka and Turkic centuries into the 20th — a continuous archive in stone, hidden in the gorges of the Tien Shan and Karatau foothills.
The petroglyph complexes of Tamgaly, Eshkiolmes, Karatau and Kulzhabasy record what the people of the steppe drew: sun-deities with rays from their heads, warriors on horseback, chariots, herds, hunts, dances, families. Tamgaly was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2004.
We visit them in the right light, with guides who can read the iconography — and we time the days so the sites are quiet.
One hundred and seventy kilometres west of Almaty. Inhabited almost without interruption for 3,500 years — around 5,000 individual images across 48 documented petroglyph complexes.
A mountain valley with petroglyphs spanning from the late Bronze Age to the Middle Ages — settlements, burials, and rock art belonging to one continuous cultural complex.
A different language carved into the same landscape — 17th-century Tibetan Buddhist images of Buddha and Bodhisattvas on cliffs above the Ili river, sacred to a later passage of the steppe.
04 — Sacred Landscapes
The spiritual geography of the Great Steppe is older than any of the religions that have crossed it — and it is still alive.
Ulytau, the sacred mountain at the geographic centre of Kazakhstan, has drawn pilgrims for more than a thousand years and holds the burial of Jochi Khan, eldest son of Genghis Khan. On the Caspian peninsula of Mangystau, fifteen to twenty rock-carved mosques — each tied to a Sufi saint — still receive pilgrims today. Five of them advanced to UNESCO consideration in 2026.
We visit with introductions from local custodians, in small groups, and in the hours when the sites are at their quietest — not on the schedule of a tour bus.
The most visited pilgrimage site of western Kazakhstan. A Sufi school carved into a chalk cliff a hundred metres above the depression, founded by the saint and philosopher Beket-Ata in the mid-1700s.
The oldest of the rocky mosques — twelve interconnected chambers, named for a disciple of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi. By tradition, pilgrims stop here before continuing on to Beket-Ata.
The geographic and spiritual heartland of the Kazakh people — kurgans of the early khans, the burial place of Jochi Khan, and the mountain where the three Kazakh juzes were said to have been united.
05 — Nomadic Life & Yurt Culture
UNESCO inscribed the yurt-making traditions of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Karakalpakstan on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in December 2025 — recognising not an architectural form, but a living cultural system.
A yurt is a collapsible wooden circular frame covered with felt and braided with ropes. Men build the wooden frame; women weave the felt and the interior textiles. The knowledge of how to make one — every joint, every pattern, every panel — is held in families and apprentice circles, not in books.
Through our YurtaDa camps and our hosting households across four landscapes, we connect travellers with the people who actually carry this culture forward: cooks, horsemen, felt-makers, kobyz players, and the elders who set the table.
The Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Karakalpak yurt traditions of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Karakalpakstan added to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity at the 20th Intergovernmental Committee in New Delhi.
The geometric and zoomorphic ornaments on a yurt's interior textiles are not decoration. They are a vocabulary that tells you which family, which clan, and which region you are sitting inside.
Hospitality in Kazakhstan is treated as ceremony, not service. The arrival of a guest is an event the household prepares for — bread, baursak, kurt, tea, then conversation, then the meat that arrives last.
Tell us which thread interests you — the kurgans, the caravan corridors, the petroglyph cliffs, the sacred mountains, or the working yurts — and we will build the route around it.