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.
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March 5, 2020