Does cultural interaction foment cultural change?: A case study from the proto-Silk Road in northwestern China
Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | February 20 | 5-7 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Andrew Womack, Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University
Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies
More than 2000 years before the development of the historical Silk Road, people living in what is now northwestern China were participating in long-distance exchange networks that brought them new goods and technologies from both the Central Asian steppe and eastern China. These included domesticates such as wheat, barley, sheep, and cattle, as well as bronze working, jade carving, and pyromantic divination. Many scholars have viewed these as transformational technologies, that, along with immigration and climate change, led to the development of a completely new cultural tradition around 2200BC. However, the results of recent fieldwork in the Tao River Valley of Gansu Province point to a much more complex relationship with these new technologies, one that involved a nuanced mixture of adoption, adaptation, and rejection. This presentation will explore these new findings and the impact they have on our understanding of cultural change across early China.
Andrew Womack is currently a postdoctoral scholar in Chinese Archaeology at the Stanford Archaeology Center. He is Associate Director of the Tao River Archaeology Project in Gansu Province, China, where his research utilizes geophysical survey, excavation, and ceramic analysis to explore identity and interaction during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age.
Lives and Deaths of Eastern Europe’s Map Men after 1919
Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | March 2 | 5-6:30 p.m. | 180 Doe Library
Speaker: Steven Seegel, Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian History, University of Northern Colorado
Sponsors: Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES), Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of transnational projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. Map Men takes a detailed look at the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind the historical dramas of a long continuum of world war and revolution in East Central Europe. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki—Map Men re-creates the public and private worlds of mapmakers who interacted with and influenced one another, even as they played key roles in defining and fearing borders, territories, peoples, and nations—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars.
Silk, gold, and glass: Upper Mustang and Nepal and the Silk Roads after 400 CE
Lecture: Center for Buddhist Studies: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | March 5 | 5-7 p.m. | 315 Wheeler Hall
Speaker: Mark Aldenderfer, Distinguished Professor and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Chair, UC Merced
Sponsors: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Himalayan studies at UC Berkeley, Institute for South Asia Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies
The high Himalayan valley of Upper Mustang today appears isolated and remote. But more than 1600 years ago, the settlements of Upper Mustang participated in an extensive trade network that ultimately connected them to the fabled Silk Road. Not only did exotic objects find their way in to the region, but new ideas and religious practices appeared in mortuary rites and rituals and which reflect a complex blend of pre-Buddhist and possibly Zoroastrian influences. The archaeological evidence supporting these claims is explored in this presentation.
Mark Aldenderfer is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Merced. His research focuses on the comparative analysis of high altitude cultural and biological adaptations from an archaeological perspective. He has worked on the three high elevation plateaus of the planet—Ethiopian, Andean, and Tibetan—over the course of his career and currently works in Upper Mustang, Nepal, where he studies long-term patterns of population movements, trade, and the transformation of religious traditions over the past 2000 years.
The Ecology of Mobility in the Eurasian Steppes: 2020 Tang Conference in Silk Road Studies
Conference: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | December 11 | 9-2 p.m. | Online Zoom Webinar
Panel 1
9-11am
Animal Style Art as a Signal of Religious Affiliation
Kathryn MacFarland, Arizona State Museum
The Continuity and the Change of Uyghur Rulers’ Legitimation
Yukiyo Kasai, Ruhr University, Bochum (Germany)
The Great Game on the Silk Road
Bryan K. Miller, University of Michigan
Discussant: James Lankton, UCL/UC Berkeley
Panel 2
12pm-2pm
Glacial Archaeology and High Altitude Prehistory in the Mongolian Steppe
William Taylor, University of Colorado Museum of Natural History
Before the Silk Roads
Alicia Ventresca Miller, University of Michigan
The Archaeology Behind Genetic Ancestries of Central Eurasia
Michael Frachetti, Washington University in St. Louis
Discussant: Andrew Womack, Furman University