Description
Book SynopsisThe enduring legacy of the Silk Roads are the goods and ideas that they facilitated and the technology that they disseminated. However, these trade routes also encompassed a web of communication, crucial for our understanding of the development of cultures, yet obscured by lack of research. This volume centres on how the exchange routes transformed the frontier regions of the Silk Road. In doing so, it utilises a range of methods to reach an archaeological interpretation of the factors that linked people with the environment; movements, settlements, and beliefs. In contrast to historical perspectives that have dominated the field to date, the volume incorporates physical records that offer a more reliable and objective understanding of the past. Taken as a whole, the case studies provide an overview of current developments where multiple lines of evidence are employed to integrate and resolve different data sets. Because trade connected a diversity of cultures, interdisciplinary collaboration is fundamental to reach the full research potential. The papers demonstrate precisely this significance by stretching across Europe, Asia, and Africa from the 4th millennium BC to the 10th century AD. The book is particularly timely given the scope of the Belt and Road Initiative, which threatens numerous archaeological sites across the Silk Roads.
Table of ContentsIntroduction – Branka Franicevic and Marie N. Pareja
Part One: Human Mobility and Migration
Chapter 1: Global Interfaces and the Earliest Evidence for Afro-Eurasian Exchange – Marie N. Pareja
Chapter 2: Genomic Landscape of the Silk Roads: Have Animals Transformed
the Trade Routes? – Branka Franicevic
Chapter 3: Changing Peoples and Practices: Exploring the Role of Cross-Cultural Contact in the British Neolithic-Bronze Age Transition – Anna Bloxam
Chapter 4: The Role of Religion in Urban Form During the 7th and 8th Centuries AD at the Extremities of the Silk Roads – Andy Hutcheson and Simon Kaner
Chapter 5: The Period Stigma in Archaeological Studies: A Consideration of Beliefs, Customs, and the Silk Roads – Dulcie Sidney Daffodil Newbury and Karina Croucher
Part Two: Iconographic and Object-Based Inquiries
Chapter 6: Polyvalent Goddesses from the Silk Roads – Marie N. Pareja
Chapter 7: Interactions of Change: Pursuing Agentive Materials and Intangible Movements along the Silk Road Network – Sara Ann Knutson
Chapter 8: Sopara Port Site Typology and the Link with Maritime Trade – Emilia Smagur, Riza Abbas, Sitaram Toraskar and Andrzej Romanowski
Chapter 9: Wings Across the Silk Roads: The Art of the Flying Horse in Early China and Beyond – Robert A. Jones
Chapter 10: Chinese Ceramic Exchange in the Maldives and the Indian Ocean, AD 900-1900 – Ran Zhang
Chapter 11: Mycenaean Pottery and Pottery Technology as a Tool to Understand Social and Cultural Changes in the Ancient World – Iro’ B. Camici
