Approximately 4,000 years ago, the peoples of China and Eurasia gradually began to develop networks of interaction and exchange that radically transformed the cultures of both regions. These networks eventually gave rise to the Silk Road trade routes connecting the East and West. Rowan Flad will examine the archaeological evidence—from the Qijia Culture of Northwest China—that documents the agricultural, metallurgical, and technological innovations that resulted from the earliest trans-Eurasian exchanges, and how studies of the Silk Road origins are being reinvigorated by China’s One Belt, One Road initiative.
Rowan Flad, John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
Presented by Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.
Recorded 10/24/18
Transcript
Origins of the Silk Roads
[00:00:07.14] Hello, everyone. Welcome, and it's my pleasure tonight to introduce our speaker. Rowan K. Flad is the John E. Hudson professor of archeology and the Department of Anthropology here at Harvard University. He holds an AB from the University of Chicago, and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.
[00:00:28.56] At Harvard, he served as the archeology program director, director of Undergraduate Studies, and department chair for the Department of Anthropology, and the chair of the Standing Committee on Archeology, and he's an affiliated faculty member of the Inner Asian and Altaic Studies department. He also serves on the academic board and was a founding board member of the Institute for Field Research and serves on the founding board of the Escherick-Ye Family Foundation.
[00:01:02.49] His research has focused on the emergence and development of complex society during the late Neolithic and Bronze Age periods in China. This work incorporates interests in diachronic change and production processes and technology, the interaction between ritual activity and production, the role of animals in early Chinese society, particularly their use in sacrifice and divination, and the processes involved in social change in general.
[00:01:31.65] He's conducted excavations at a salt production site in eastern Sichuan Basin, a regional archaeological survey in the Chengdu region, focusing on prehistoric settlement patterns and social evolution, and currently directs an international collaborative survey and excavation project in the Tao River Valley in Gansu. This project focuses on technological change in various domains and investigates the formation processes of community interaction involved in the development of the proto Silk Road.
[00:02:04.27] His current research and writing projects focus on several aspects of social complexity, including specialized production and technology, the anthropology value, mortuary analysis, archaeological landscapes, inter-regional interaction, cultural transmission, and animal and plant domestication. He also teaches. Please join me in welcoming Professor Flad.
[00:02:28.42] [APPLAUSE]
[00:02:38.41] Thank you, Jane. Thank you, Jeff. I wanted to thank the Peabody Museum staff also for putting this program together. And also, thank my collaborators in China, without whom a lot of the work I've been able to do on this project and others I wouldn't be able to accomplish. It's delightful to have so many of you here today to join us in this discussion about the origins of the Silk Road in China. Despite the weather, you have braved the transition of seasons, and it's nice to have you here.
[00:03:11.74] Today, I'm going to be talking about the nature of networks and interaction that connect distant places across Eurasia. I wanted to point out from the beginning that my vantage point is decidedly eastern situated in China, where I conduct my fieldwork. And so most of the conversation that I'm going to have today will involve discussion of the origins of the Silk Roads, and to a large extent, the proto Silk Road that Jeff referred to from the point of view of the places where I've been working on the kind of eastern parts of these networks of interaction.
[00:03:53.23] I also want to emphasize that these networks of interaction at the origins that I'm going to be talking about for most of the time are really not trade routes per se, as Jane referred to them, and as we often think about the Silk Roads. But we'll get there in a second, in terms of my framing of this discussion.
[00:04:13.48] Before I get started, I did want to mention one thing. Jeff mentioned I'm on the board of the Institute for Field Research, which is a program or it's an institute, a nonprofit that coordinates archaeological, and ethnographic, and environmental field schools around the world. As a board member, it's part of my duty to publicize this organization and encourage any of you who have students, who are students, who are teachers with students, who have children, who might be interested in getting them involved in the conducting of real research in an explicitly educational environment to ask me questions about this if you're interested afterwards or to just go to the website ifrglobal.org and see the offerings for this coming season, which will be announced as November 1st. And there will be about 55 field schools around the world that are all rigorously vetted in the process of the work that I and others do.
[00:05:11.14] All right, I'm going to start my lecture today with a question, and this is what I want to do to have your cell phones still available for, those of you who happen to have cell phones. I'm going to ask you to send me a text. And this text addresses the question from the perspective of East Asia, which is kind of something I added on at the end. When did the Silk Roads begin?
[00:05:34.94] Now, you're here at this lecture. You presumably have heard of the Silk Road before or maybe you were just curious about what it might be, so you might have an idea. Now, this first one is an oddly specific date. I'll explain that in a second. This you can more or less consider the medieval period, so again, 581 to 907 AD, a period well into the dynastic cycle in China, the Han dynasty, about the time of the Roman Empire, or earlier, I guess, is the last choice.
[00:06:11.75] So as we get some text here, that should start to populate if it's working. Oh, there we go. Hey.
[00:06:20.51] Text you or--
[00:06:21.59] You text this. You send that word to that number, and then you put A, B, C, or D. You text that word to that number, and then you text one of those letters, A, B, C, or D. Nobody seems to think 1877 is right. Oh, Here we go. I think these people might just want to know why I put this on here.
[00:07:01.15] All right, a lot of you are into the proto Silk Roads here. All right, so the trick here, of course, is it's not overly obvious, is that to some extent, all of these are true. But you may wonder why some of them are. And I'll kind of go through for my first few slides a little bit about each of these.
[00:07:20.05] It may not be obvious that this 1877 year is relevant, but it is. This term, the Silk Road, was actually introduced as "Seidenstrasse" by this guy, Baron Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen, who is a relative of some relative close relationship with Manfred Von Richthofen, the Red Baron, who's a little more famous in most circles.
[00:07:47.05] This von Richthofen was a geologist who worked in Eurasia, and actually wrote a book that talks about the Silk Road, the "Seidenstrasse" and introduced that term into the literature. And so to some extent, this concept begins in 1877 with von Richthofen's discussion and publication that reflects on the interactions across Eurasia. There's a great paper by Tamara Chin at Brown University, which is cited down here, about the history of this term and this concept that I recommend to anybody who's further interested.
[00:08:22.94] My poll also highlighted the Sui and Tang period, in the medieval period, perhaps, of China, during which we really see a pulse of incorporation over parts of Central Asia. And you see these maps that purport to show the extent of the centralized control associated with dynastic families whose capitals are located in various parts of the eastern part of China.
[00:08:50.23] During the Sui and Tang, which we've passed already on my sequence, there is some degree of formality over the control of the networks of communication that developed, in large part, to foster and facilitate trade and commerce, this notion of trade routes that was referred to before. However, more often, when we talk about the trans-Eurasian Silk Road, what comes to mind are these controlled routes that coalesced in the late centuries before the Common Era and into the Common Era during the Han dynasty, particularly as the Han dynasty established some sort of military control over their far western border lands.
[00:09:31.51] In some tellings, the origin myth of the Silk Road focuses on, not surprisingly, silk, which purportedly first traveled outside of China in the possession of a princess promised to the kingdom of Khotan in the first century of the Common Era. Maps such as these come to mind, and the connections that they portray reflect critically important component of globalizing world system into which Han China was becoming integrated during this period.
[00:09:58.42] Likewise, what's not drawn on these maps is routes to the south, sometimes called the Tea and Horses Road or the "Chamadao" connecting the Han core and other parts of the Chinese world to southeast Asia and across the Tibetan Plateau, which was becoming established during the Han dynasty, as well. And we have good evidence now for that archaeologically.
[00:10:20.51] The grand narrative of the subsequent millennium of interconnections has recently been told in a 2017 book by Peter Frankopan, which many of you may be familiar with. This is the best-selling book for good reason. It highlights the various ways in which these connections were complicated, multiple, and dynamic, involving connections of faith, commerce, conflict, empire, and technology, all the way up into the 20th century.
[00:10:48.24] This theme of multiple networks of connectivity lies at the root of why I use the plural "roads" in my talk today. And what I intend to talk about of the origins of these networks and connections. And as it should be obvious by now, the plural in "origins" is also intentional because there are many different origins for these Silk Roads that we are going to be talking about. The proto Silk Roads that I'm going to be focusing on are really not evidenced by historical records. And instead, we see them through archaeological evidence, specifically, evidence of long-distance connections reflected in technology.
[00:11:28.98] And Jeff mentioned that one of the things that I work on is the archeology of technology, so I'm going to take a little side trip here into discussion of technology and what technology is. We'll start with a definition. Technology can actually be defined in many ways, but I really like this succinct and satisfying definition by Carrie Brezine, who is a specialist in Andean textiles, who received her PhD here in our anthropology department, and worked on technologies during the early contact period of Peru. She writes that technology is "a system of practices interrelating the transformation of material resources, abstract and practical knowledge, and social and political relationships, and cultural beliefs."
[00:12:14.55] There are many parts of this definition that I really want to highlight here. And perhaps, first and foremost, is this notion of practices that draws attention to the aspects of technology that involve the process of making or doing things. Furthermore, I want to emphasize that this definition talks about the transformation of material resources, and that focuses our attention on how resources are vital, practices are formative, and that, often, if not always, technologies are material, and therefore, archaeologically visible. So if we want to understand technologies, we can do so even in the absence of textual sources because of the residue that they leave behind.
[00:12:59.44] Interrelating these various aspects of the material connects these resources and practices to knowledge, relationships, and beliefs, and those are the really core elements that we who study technology want to get at when we are looking at technological remains. So this interrelationship of technological practices reflects how technology with a capital T is an essential component of what it means to be human, connecting all aspects of human behavior. It is through the chemistry of technology that a society and economy are able to function.
[00:13:39.30] This chemistry metaphor comes from a book that some of you may also know, which is called The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur, an economist who works on complexity theory, particularly in relation to positive feedback loops and economic returns, and someone who has argued about the enabling effects of technological innovations. Without belaboring the kind of perspective of this book too much, I want to summarize some of Arthur's main points.
[00:14:08.22] He shows us how the concept of technology, including the definition I just gave to you, can actually be considered at different levels of abstraction. Certain technologies at the most basic level are singular. They are "processes or individual devices, means to fulfill a human purpose," as he defines it. He uses examples mostly from modern military technology for some reason, like particular types of aircraft. But we can think of horse riding in this sense, or even individual tools as a type of technology in the singular.
[00:14:45.36] Second is a plural definition, that are "assemblages," and this is quoting him again, "assemblages of processes or components, such as electronics, or agriculture, or pyrotechnology." And finally, there is the general or composite collection of technology, technology with a capital T, the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture. When I said before that technology is what makes us human, this is the level of technology that I was really referring to.
[00:15:14.84] So investigations of technology in archaeological context must rely on the material manifestations of ancient technological practices that represent these various levels of abstraction. The ceramics, bronzes, plant remains, features connected to pyrotechnology, like this one up on the upper-right-hand part of the slide, aspects of agricultural technology, like the plant remains that we see below-- these sorts of things are the means that we have to investigate technology.
[00:15:45.33] Arthur talks about how technologies result from a combination of different, other, pre-existing technologies. And so technological change results in this combinatory process of adding on and is based on the technologies that existed before. And furthermore, that these technologies draw on natural phenomenon.
[00:16:06.60] Accordingly, we should then explicitly examine how newer technologies, whether we're talking about the modern day or the ancient world, build upon, or perhaps in certain cases, don't build upon pre-existing technologies when they're introduced from another place. Do the pigments used in ceramic production, like the example you see on the upper-left here, for example, change or remain the same when we identify shifts in iconography or shifts in decorative practice?
[00:16:35.49] Second, we should pay particular attention to technological domains that involve multiple, combined technologies. In the realm of pyrotechnology, for example, are the kilns, and furnaces, and other facilities that are used to make ceramics similar or different to, related to or not, those that are used to make other types of pyrotechnological materials, such as metals? Do they have similar functions, orientations, placements in the sites where they are found?
[00:17:05.42] Third, if natural phenomena are critical to the operation of technology, understanding these phenomena should affect the ability to successfully incorporate new technological components into a technological system. And so this is perhaps the most important one I want to point your attention to today. I'm going to talk about the technological evidence we have for the proto Silk Roads and these connections between places.
[00:17:28.61] But I want you to think about is how people at the local level in their everyday lives, how they were able to incorporate these new things-- new types of plants, new types of animals, new types of ways of dealing with the environment around them into their own everyday lives. It's not as easy as it may seem. And it doesn't rely on a simple calculation of efficiency or effectiveness when one is already situated in a particular context where you're used to doing things a certain way.
[00:17:58.47] So with these notes about technology in mind, I'm going to move back to our discussion topic on the Silk Roads today. And I want to focus our attention on the connections we see across Eurasia in the realm of technology that constitute this proto Silk Road.
[00:18:16.64] To address the questions about technologies and how they're intertwined in the development of networks of interaction, we, of course, need to consider context. In addition to the chronological context, such as the Tang or Sui, or the Han dynasty, or the prehistoric period that I'm going to really focus on, we must also understand how technologies are related on a regional scale, for example, where we find evidence for shared or different, but functionally similar technologies at one time, and on a specific site scale, including understanding how the position of technological activities at a site may differ, for example, from one place to another, or the ways in which the placement of technological remains relate to other parts of the space in which people live.
[00:19:07.00] As is true with almost all anthropological studies and archaeological studies, context is the most critical variable. I will discuss context on three scales, three spatial scales, today. First, we can explore how the data at the macro scale indicate connections across Eurasia, in the trans-Eurasian Silk Road, and some connections towards the south, in the area that develops into this southern Silk Road region. And the first part of my talk today will really kind of involve a discussion of some of the data that exists that demonstrate these sorts of connections, these longer distance connections.
[00:19:45.37] But I want to emphasize this next point, is that macro-regional patterns themselves only tell a part of the story of technological change. What is really missing in our understanding at the present is a focused investigation of micro-regional economic and social development. And so the project that I am involved in leading and what the second part of my talk today will introduce is really trying to focus on that work, work in an area called the Tao River Valley that really kind of sits at the juncture of these two networks of a longer-distance interaction.
[00:20:23.29] The Tao River is a tributary to the Yellow River, where we've been conducting work for a number of years now, and it sits at this really interesting location. Along the Tao River Valley, localized processes must be investigated to provide a finer spatial and chronological resolution if we are eventually to address the technological changes that sit at the foundation of Chinese civilization and that sit at the foundation of the origins of the Silk Roads. It is through networks of proto Silk Road that all sorts of technologies were transferred into and out of the region that we now call China. Today I am briefly going to note some of these changes and the work that we're doing to investigate them.
[00:21:05.77] The Tao River is a fruitful region to investigate these for a number of different reasons. One concerns the fact that there's actually a lot of data to start working with. A total of 531 known prehistoric sites exist along the Tao River Valley, and these are known to various degrees. This is based on the third National Survey of Cultural Heritage, which was completed in 2012, and which, at every single provincial level in China, was intended to bring together the known data that have come into the understanding of archaeologists and people who manage cultural heritage in various ways.
[00:21:49.12] And so one of the reasons why the Tao River Valley is a useful place to investigate these sorts of questions is because there are data to work with. It's also a place that plays a seminal role in the origins of the practice of archeology in China. And that is in large part due to this guy, a guy named Johan Gunner Andersson, who is sometimes thought of as one of the fathers of archeology in China. He was a Swedish geologist, who was brought to China by the Republican government in the 19-teens, and was intended to help develop the national Geological Survey.
[00:22:28.90] And in the process he, as was common with geologists at the time, was interested in understanding antiquities, stratigraphy, and recognized the evidence for a deeper antiquity than had previously really been understood based on a historical approach to the past. Among his first discoveries of archaeological data in China, he worked at a place called Yangshao in a place called Mianchi in Henan province, where he recognized prehistoric pottery that had painted designs on it.
[00:23:08.48] And in his familiarity with the relatively non-systematic research across Eurasia at the time, he suggested that there were connections between that site and sites far to the west, in western Eurasia, associated with the Anau culture. These artifacts are actually here in the Peabody Museum collection, many of them. And so you could, if you're interested, look at them yourself.
[00:23:32.86] Superficially, these similarities are quite striking, if you look at the drawings that he produced at the time. When you look at the artifacts, they're actually not very similar to each other, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point, which was, at the time, he suggested that there might be a connection, a historical connection between these places.
[00:23:53.69] And because of the big gap in between, it drew his attention westward from Henan in the lower Yellow River Valley towards this part of China, where the Tao River Valley is located. And in fact, it was known to many locals that there were painted pottery cultures, painted pottery sites in this region, including along the Tao River Valley, where he came to do surveys and investigations in the 1920s.
[00:24:21.26] And so he came to the Tao River Valley specifically for two reasons, one of which is that, as a geologist, he was interested in understanding stratigraphy, particularly the stratigraphy of loess deposits in northern China. And the Tao River Valley is a very good place to examine stratigraphic profiles that provide evidence for that. But furthermore, it was in the Tao River Valley that people who sold antiquities and Andersson knew there were sites to be found that had archaeological remains, and so he came down there to investigate them.
[00:24:52.19] And here you see an example of photographs, a number of photographs in this wonderful book by Magnus Fiskesjo and Chen Xingcan that documents the evidence of Andersson's work, much of which is kept at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden, where half of the material that Andersson collected at that time was taken during the process of research. This is a photograph from one of his collecting trips. And the next photograph is from an excavation that he conducted at a site called Qijia. And we're going to hear a fair amount about Qijia in the subsequent conversation today.
[00:25:35.03] These names that you see on the left-hand part of this slide are the names of archaeological traditions that are used to be shorthand for chronological phases in northwestern China by archaeologists, even to the present day. And practically every one of these was based on a site identified by Andersson. The Yangshao culture I already mentioned was the site in Henan. But the rest of these, Majiayao, Banshan, Qijia, Xindian, and Siwa-- these are all sites in the Tao River Valley. So essentially, the entire chronology of northwestern prehistory is based on archaeological sites in this one river valley, all visited by Anderson during the 1920s. And so it's important historically for that reason because of the influence it's had on our understanding of the history of the region more generally.
[00:26:25.94] Now, I show you on the right-hand side here, general chronological ranges for these traditions as we understand them now. However, it's important to point out here a couple of things, one of which is that these chronological ranges are fuzzy. We actually don't have, even to now, a very firm control over them. Furthermore, Andersson originally had this Qijia period, which sits in a really critical point in the chronological development of northern Chinese societies.
[00:26:56.30] He originally thought that Qijia was at the beginning of this sequence. Now, we know that's wrong now. We know it's wrong in large part because of work by another very influential archaeologist named Xia Nai, who was the director of the Institute of Archeology in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for a period, and perhaps one of the most influential archaeologists of the later part of the 20th century. He did work here that demonstrated the position that Qijia culture should sit in this chronological sequence.
[00:27:27.74] But Andersson didn't just put it at the beginning for no particular reason. He did that for two primary reasons, one of which, is during his excavations that you see in the background here, at the site of Qijiaping, which is the type site for the Qijia culture, he identified this material of the Qijia culture in C2 in the underground. But on the surface, there were some painted pottery. And so by the kind of basic law of super positioning, the stuff buried underneath should be earlier than the stuff on the surface, right? And so the painted pottery cultures of the Majiayao, Banshan, and Machang should be later, perhaps, in that stratigraphic relationship.
[00:28:05.87] Furthermore, the Qijia materials is much simpler in nature. It's typically undecorated plain wares in terms of the ceramic assemblage. And he didn't find any bronze material in the excavations that he conducted. Whereas, he thought that the painted pottery cultures should be of the Bronze Age and should be associated with bronze production.
[00:28:30.23] And that's actually where he got things most wrong. In fact, it is during the Qijia period that we see the real introduction of metallurgy into this region of China. And then subsequently, bronze metallurgy, in particular, becomes one of the hallmarks of Chinese civilization. The scale of bronze production during the later part of the second millennium and into the first millennium BC dwarfs all bronze production anywhere else in Eurasia or anywhere else in the world, really.
[00:29:02.48] And it's this at this point in time during and associated with the Qijia culture that we really start to see the introduction of this technology into east Asia, into this region from places presumably further west. And we say that now because we have a reasonably clear time series of bronze production in central Asia that precedes this. And it is very similar in nature to the small sorts of bronze objects that are reflected here.
[00:29:30.44] Now, that's not to say that all bronze production in China is derivative of this technology that comes in from central Asia. In fact, the way in which bronze production develops in China is really a unique trajectory of its own. But the first stages of that see metallurgy associated with the Qijia culture. And these are from a site called Mogou, which is a really interesting site, again, in the Tao River Valley, in the upper regions of it.
[00:29:56.78] Now, that's not the place from which we have the earliest remains of metallurgy in east Asia and in China. In fact, that's further to the northwest, including at sites such as this one published by a collaborating group from China and Australia, published about 5, 10 years ago now, that really documents about 2,200 BC, local bronze production at a couple of sites in a tributary to this region called the Hexi Corridor, that place that really becomes the core of the Silk Roads in more historic periods. And so we see this metallurgy as one of these technological innovations for which we are developing an understanding of the connections between central Asia and eastern Eurasia.
[00:30:50.75] In the Tao River Valley, painted ceramics, such as the ones on this left-hand side here, reflect the pinnacle of craft production through the third millennium BC. But it's with the advent of metallurgy that we see a very radical change in the kind of decorative motifs and the style of ceramics with the introduction of metallurgy, such as this objects that we find at Mogou.
[00:31:17.00] Metal objects actually, furthermore, document a connection between this region and Qijia culture specifically and connections towards the central plains, this region of China in the lower Yellow River Valley that becomes the fount of Chinese civilization, particularly the site of Erlitou. We see some objects, such as these bronze mirrors, that are typical of Qijia cultural repertoire. But also, and for some of you who are familiar with the collections of the art museum here, objects like these.
[00:31:51.14] This one in the center is an object from Erlitou. And we have a number of objects like this in the art museums at Harvard. These are bronze plaques inlaid with turquoise. And these are thought to be something that is associated with this very important site in the lower Yellow River Valley that is seen to be really indicative of the transformation towards a major bronze-producing culture in that region.
[00:32:16.25] But it's important to note that similar objects, like the one on the left, have been found in Qijia cultural contexts. And these really clearly represent, with their unique style and combination of different technologies, connections between these places, suggesting how important this northwestern region in the Qijia culture is in the development of Chinese civilization.
[00:32:40.48] A second realm of technological change during this period that reflects changing local traditions of symbolism and craft production is the manufacturer of jades. True jade, jadeite, is not a material found in eastern parts of China, and access to sources in Xinjiang have been thought to be another vector of interactions to central Asia from a relatively early period.
[00:33:01.52] However, in the context of Qijia production, Qijia jade production, it seems that there are sources of nephrite, a different type of jade, in regions that are close to where the Qijia sites are located. So this is the Tao River Valley flowing from south to north here. And this is a mountain range called the Maqianshan where there are nephrite sources known even today.
[00:33:26.53] And in fact, the place where those are located is at a source of tributaries that lead right into the Tao River right where Qijiaping is located, and where there's a number of known other sites that are contemporary with this where jade production seems to have been taking place. These connections between Maqianshan and the Tao River Valley really suggests that jade manufacturer is associated with the Qijia culture sites in this region.
[00:33:57.55] Another realm of technology that demonstrates nascent networks of long-distance interaction and influence that sets the stage for historic-era Silk Roads concerns the spread of new cereal crops from their original origins of domestication. We see the introduction of wheat and barley, which you can see in the blue line here, from places further west, originally domesticated in the Fertile Crescent and the Levant of western Asia, slowly into central Asia and into eastern Asia.
[00:34:27.46] And similarly, and in a different direction, the domestication of millets, which first occurred in eastern Asia, then being something that is adopted by and incorporated into some agricultural traditions moving towards central Asia, and some people even have suggested places much further west, all the way to Europe. And so these connections in the realm of agricultural technologies is another line of evidence that we have in terms of the big picture, in this macro scale to understand these proto Silk Road connections.
[00:35:04.33] We can say the same thing or a very similar thing in relation to animals, where connections are shown through the adoption, again, of domesticates that come from a different part of Eurasia into a new part. The introduction of caprine, sheep and goat, cattle, horses are all introduced from places further west in Eurasia into east Asia from these long-distance networks of interaction, and pigs and dogs towards central Asia from places where they were domesticated further to the east.
[00:35:35.08] And so animal technologies and agricultural technologies in this realm can also be thought of in relation to these practices. Many of these animal taxa, particularly cattle and horses, became really important for symbolic and functional roles in early Chinese civilization, as I explained with the bronze technology before.
[00:36:01.66] Cattle, for example, provide the bones that are the medium on which the first writing in China is known. This example in the upper-right, an oracle bone from the site of Yinxu in Anyang in Henan again, in the same general region as Erlitou, which I've mentioned before, and Yangshou, is an example of this from about 1250 BC. This on the lower-left is a turtle plastron, which was the other medium for this type of writing.
[00:36:30.41] Now, it's important to note that these are not the earliest oracle bones in China. In fact, oracle bones are another technological medium that develops around this time, around the third millennium BC and into the second millennium BC, and illustrates long distance connections, although, not directly implicating connections to central Asia. These early oracle bones from northern China, different parts of northern China, did not have writing on them. And so I want to make that clear because these are not evidence of earlier use of these types of bones for writing, but they are burned in the same fashion. They were put to the same sort of purpose of divination in order to help mediate the world around the people who were using them.
[00:37:18.85] Finally, we have the realm of ceramic technologies, the changes in which are often used as fundamental lens through which we observe change in technological traditions. And here you see a sequence that I showed before, but in a different form, from the Yangshao, through the painted pottery cultures of the Majiayao, Banshan, and Machang, through the Qijia, Xindians, and Siwa, and later cultures, illustrated by the types of ceramics that are characteristic of them.
[00:37:43.09] The sequence of archeological cultures in the region from the Majiayao, to the Banshan, to the Machang, to the Qijia culture does not reflect a pattern that can be tied in a straightforward manner to the arrival of metal-producing wheat-eating, sheep-herding central Asians. Instead, the process of uptake and adoption of these different types of technologies was intensely local and involved the differential adoption of different new technologies in various places at different times and to different degrees.
[00:38:19.86] And this is the rub. This is why it's not sufficient for us just to talk about the fact that we have this evidence for long-distance connections, and there we go. In fact, we must focus our attention on local communities, where new technologies were taken up, and therefore, we must return to the local scale. So for the rest of the talk today, I'm going to focus more on the local scale, where we can try to start understanding the manifestation of these technological traditions and how they were taken up by local communities.
[00:38:55.95] The project that I have been leading for the last number of years focuses on examining some of the sites, some of these 531 sites known from the Tao River Valley. We started by looking at the sites that we were able to locate based on this register of known places, looking at their topographic conditions, and seeing whether they would be conducive to additional research. And so for the next 15 minutes or so, 10 or 15 minutes, I'm going to talk about what that additional research involves, and what sort of things that we're doing in order to try to address these problems, these questions about local adoption on the local level are.
[00:39:39.16] And I will tell you now that we aren't yet entirely at the point where I can give you definitive conclusions about things, in case you are going to be holding your breath for that. But you can see that we already have some really interesting data that speak to these processes of long-distance interaction at a certain level. So we started in 2012 with a survey of many of these sites, visiting the sites that are known from the region, investigating the nature of their composition-- their size, the degree to which we perceive them to be worthy of additional work.
[00:40:16.13] Oh, I wanted to mention one other thing. In this process, in this site, and this whole project has been built in large part in collaboration with a number of colleagues, including colleagues in China, but also these two people, my dear friend CHEN Bozhen (Pochan Chen) who was a classmate of mine at UCLA, and was teaching at National Taiwan University, and HUNG Ling-yu who was teaching at Indiana University. And both of these individuals have passed away recently very young, both from illnesses. And I just want to recognize their contributions to this project.
[00:40:50.19] This work is something that then focused on picking sites among these. We selected 24 of the known sites to do additional work on. And some of those you can see depicted on this slide. This is another image of the Tao River Valley that I showed before. And I'm going to focus most of our attention on Qijiaping, the site I've mentioned already, which was the type site of the Qijia culture, where Andersson did his work previously.
[00:41:16.56] Our main goal is to understand the spatial organization of features at this site and others like it, and the others hopefully will help us provide information on different chronological phases of the work in this region. And so my next several slides, I introduce you to the kind of stages of the work that we've been doing.
[00:41:36.24] We start by conducting a surface survey of the site. And in this particular case, we were benefited by the fact that our colleagues at the Gansu Provincial Institute of Archeology, with whom we worked very closely, had also conducted a systematic coring survey of the site in preparation for the listing of Qijiaping on the National Historic Register.
[00:42:00.18] And so these maps, this one and the next one, are maps that were generated in this process. And they're very useful as a baseline on which we can conduct our work. What you see on here is a kind of a delimiting line for where most of the archaeological remains were found. And the orange marks are different types of archaeological features that were identified during this coring process.
[00:42:21.66] From that data, we can identify two main clusters of materials at the site. And those two main clusters seem to be separated, more or less, into a residential area and an area which contained a cemetery and perhaps some features associated with pyrotechnology production.
[00:42:40.20] In 2013, building on this previous information, started to do some systematic work of our own, including creating a map of the site. Now, you might wonder why if we had this map, why we needed another map. Well, it turns out that the group that did this map for our colleagues in the Gansu Provincial Institute of Archeology made a map that is not very accurate. And so it's useful for that sort of work. But for the purposes of the work that I'm going to describe in a second, we needed to have a high degree of precision as to where everything we found was located.
[00:43:14.05] So we started doing some mapping of our own, collecting surface material at the site, and creating, really, a sense of where we had the densest material on the surface that might reflect the subsurface remains that could be subjected to further analysis. So all the yellow lines you see on this map are collection areas where we collected the ceramics.
[00:43:37.89] We can use that to create density maps, such as this one. And the white areas on this density map show parts of the site that have the highest concentrations on the surface of material. And this gives us a sense that in the area around the modern village, where we think which we think of as the residential part of the site, there's a lot more material than we see down in this area, where, nevertheless, there's some stuff on the surface as well.
[00:44:03.12] Focusing our attention down there, I'll turn back to one of the topographic maps that is made and is associated with that coring data that I showed before, and you can see one dotted area, which was a cemetery zone, and then a number of other little red spots, which are features that were identified during this coring work. Now, that cemetery zone is known to be a cemetery because it was excavated in 1975 by the Gansu Provincial Institute of Archeology, and it's the only excavations that have been done there. But it is very revealing, showing a collection of materials that is very typical of the Qijia culture and nature, also bronze objects, like this bronze mirror, an oracle bone from a sheep scapula, and some turquoise objects as well.
[00:44:51.90] In this region, outside of the area of the cemetery, there is a zone where there were a number of features identified by the coring that seem to be pyrotechnological in nature. It had read burned earth associated with them and in that same region we found this object during our survey which is a panel an anvil used in the production of pottery and so we thought this is a very good location to investigate for remains of pyrotechnological facilities that would help us understand some of these questions.
[00:45:21.57] We conducted a geophysical survey, where we laid out a grid, used this device, which is a magnetometer, to collect data systematically across certain areas. And these gray areas of this map are the geophysical data, the data from the magnetometer, that we collected. Blowing one of those areas up, we see lots of kind of gray, black, and white on this.
[00:45:45.84] The areas of white or black are anomalies. They are different from the surrounding baseline. And they are worthy of investigation in some fashion. You can't really tell what they are, other than that they are affecting the Earth's magnetic field in a way that is not typical of the sediment surrounding them. And so what I've circled for you here is a number of particularly intense anomalies that we decided were worth investigation, particularly because one of them was very close to a place that had been identified as a potential kiln by the coring group.
[00:46:17.04] Now you'll notice there's only one kiln identified by the coring group, but we have six similar anomalies in this region. We investigated one with an excavation trench starting in 2016. This is the coring that we did at the time to see what it might be. We found some burned red earth.
[00:46:36.96] We started excavations there. We found a, more or less, square, burned area, which we were very happy because it matched up very closely with the geophysical data that we had. And we called this kiln number one, "yao yi," kiln number one. This is an amazing kiln. It is 2 meters by 2 meters in size, more or less, 1.6 by 1.8. Sorry, 2.8 long, about 1.6 to 1.8 wide, and is almost 4 meters deep.
[00:47:13.62] It's a really impressive construction that included a number of tile fragments on the floor down near one of the main flues. Now, the tile, all along, as we got digging into this, we started getting more and more worried. Because at the beginning, we were really happy to be finding a Qijia-culture kiln. A Qijia-culture kiln from our recognition, although not very many have been excavated, probably shouldn't be this big.
[00:47:38.38] And in fact, this is not a Qijia-culture period kiln. This is a kiln from the Song dynasty. It's nevertheless, so much later in terms of its chronology, from probably-- and I'll talk about the chronology in just a second, but from around 1,000 years ago rather than 3,500 years ago. The inside of the kiln that was really well preserved-- these pillars, incidentally, are just bulks that we left to keep it from collapsing on itself. But in the background, you can see these flue components to the kiln, where the hot air would have escaped.
[00:48:13.26] And inside the central flue, it was jammed full of a bunch of artifacts-- including a number of bones, some rocks, including a very curiously shaped phallic-shaped rock, which we believe was intentionally placed there as part of the killing of this kiln when it was no longer useful. The tile fragments themselves, as well as the porcelain fragment that we found in the middle of the kiln suggests a chronology of this kiln from the Northern Song period, probably in the 12th century AD.
[00:49:00.12] Some of this work is done by a PhD student here, ZHANG Chengrui, who I know is in the audience, and has done a really very interesting study of the significance of this particular Northern Song dynasty kiln. The dating of this is still not finalized. One potential explanation for it relates to the establishment in this area of more firm control after the early 12th century AD. We see very strong similarities between the Qijiaping kiln and Northern Song kilns from Luoyang in Henan. And these kilns in Henan were associated with a military establishment. It is during this same general time-- oh, and we have thermo-luminescence dates states that, to some extent, corroborate that at the moment.
[00:49:52.68] We see a cluster of these anomalies in this region. And this may be a cluster of kilns from this period that could relate to the Northern Song expansion in the 11th or 12th century AD, when the Northern Song expanded into this area that was previously controlled by a Tibetan polity. So that's a bit of an aside, but it's an interesting result that we have come up with. Not as closely related to the proto Silk Road materials, but does relate to these interactions between the core of China and polities in its surrounding region from a later period.
[00:50:30.96] We've also conducted geophysics on the northern part of this site. And all the rest of the remains I'm going to talk about really do relate to the chronological phases that we're interested in. The work in the residential zone identified a large number of anomalies in the geophysics data that we collected. We have investigated a couple of them with excavation units, such as the one you saw before. And in 2016 and in 2017, we recovered pit remains, within which we were able to extract carbonized plant remains, animal bones, and ceramics, all of which help us to start to understand the various technologies that were being incorporated into the daily lives of the people at Qijiaping during this period.
[00:51:21.06] This particular pit also had oracle bones in it. And a pit number T2 in the same general region, excavated in 2017, had this guy, which is perhaps the most evocative piece so far in the excavation, unless you count the stone phallus, I suppose.
[00:51:40.07] The plant remains from this project, including the work at this site and others, are being researched by scholars from Shandong University under the direction of JIN Guiyun and UC San Diego under the direction of Jade d'Alpoim Guedes, a former PhD from this department. And among the plant remains that we've found so far at Qijiaping are wheat, and barley, and oats, all of which are west Asian domesticates that were transplanted into this region by the time of the Qijia culture, if not before.
[00:52:11.73] So this is a quick overview of the sort of work that we've done at Qijiaping. For the last five minutes or so, I'm going to kind of go through two other sites that we've done similar work at without dwelling on the details, but just so that you can get a sense of how we're going to do the work that's necessary to frame these data and our understanding of the transition and technologies in the Qijia culture.
[00:52:35.87] One of these is a site called Huizuiwa, which is a little bit downriver from Qijiaping, where we've similarly done survey work. We have done geophysics. We are able to estimate more or less where the residential part of the site was located. And we've excavated a couple of pits, in which, we've found the sorts of ceramics that are associated with the Xindian culture, the culture that is subsequent to the Qijia period. And we found oracle bones. You can see one in situ here as well. Again, from a caprine, like the one at Qijiaping.
[00:53:10.24] Another site that we've done this sort of a work at is called Dayatou. Dayatou is located on this large platform just looking overlooking the Tao River. Qijiaping is actually just over to the side here, so it's very nearby. But this site dates to the period before the change Qijia culture, the Majiayao painted pottery cultures in this region. We have similarly, at this site, done a bunch of surface survey.
[00:53:35.12] We have done a number of zones of geophysics in the yellow in the background here and from this geophysics work, we have a really interesting map of a very complicated site. Now, unlike most of the other sites that we have focused some of our work on, including Huizuiwa and a few others, Dayatou has never had previous work done at it.
[00:53:54.91] And so, with the trenches that we've excavated here just this past season, were the first excavation work ever done there. And for that reason, we were really not sure what we were going to come up with. One of those excavation units came down on a pit, on a bell-shaped pit that was filled with charcoal, and has provided us some really great data on plant use and animal bones from this period, and seems to date quite firmly to this phase in the third millennium before that Qijia culture.
[00:54:23.30] Our other two trenches are really interesting because they cut across a number of different features, including a pit that had a burial in it, but without any other type of objects associated with the burial, and have given us a better sense of the stratigraphy there, which seems to be mostly associated with this phase before the Qijia culture. And we've also found some turquoise at this site, which is interesting, given the use of turquoise in some of these types of objects associated with the Qijia period. We've been able to collect animal bones from Dayatou and Qijiaping, and Huizuiwa, and start to at least help us understand the transition and the way in which people were interacting with animals in their environment.
[00:55:10.06] And from these data, perhaps the most interesting aspect of our preliminary data from this project, shows a really clear transition from, again, the earlier phase, through the Qijiaping, to the Huizuiwa, of a transition towards an increasing use of caprines. And what that relates to is a broader understanding that sheep and goat pastoralism becomes an increasingly dominant form of subsistence, practice, and landscape use in this region. More broadly, during this transition from the third through the second millennium BC.
[00:55:44.17] Now, again, this, at present, simply fits into our broader overall macro original model. But by understanding exactly when and exactly to what extent these types of technologies were adopted, we can really start to focus in on understanding these processes of transition.
[00:56:04.00] All right, so the last two things I wanted to say had to do with the broader nature of this project. In the context of this project, we've conducted some training with our colleagues in China on geophysics, the use of magnetometry, and GIS, a workshop were conducted by my colleague, Jason Ara, who's sitting down here in the front row, a few years ago.
[00:56:26.12] And this reflects on a kind of a broader issue. The technological exchange between east and west does not have a neat and tidy beginning that can be clearly marked, which was the point I was making with the poll at the very beginning of the lecture. There are many beginnings. And in some ways, the origins of the Silk Road start all the way with the origins of humanity in Eurasia. Similarly, the Silk Road has not stopped becoming a meaningful phenomenon. These exchanges of technologies in the context of the practice of archeology, for example, are one manifestation of this.
[00:57:00.10] Another, more politically-inspired relationship is related to the One Belt, One Road initiative, also known as the 21st century Maritime Silk Road. And this initiative, directed by Xi Jinping, starting from 2013. This involves infrastructural development, rail and highway construction, and is an aggressive soft power and developmental diplomacy program that China is using to project power across Eurasia and further afield. This builds explicitly on the metal metaphors of the Silk Road and shows how even in the present day, the Silk Road is relevant.
[00:57:35.81] Even this 21st century manifestation, however, needs to be understood in a social and historical contexts. In the context of a proto Silk Road analysis, we still have a lot of work to do. But through for future analysis, our goal is to develop an understanding of Qijia technology, with a capital T, in this particular river valley as a local manifestation of broader geographical phenomenon. We intend to do this by examining these devices and processes that make up the realms of subsistence technology, craft technology, prestige technology, transportation technology, and so forth.
[00:58:11.00] And to take steps in this direction, the first question concerns where, both regionally within sites, certain technological practices occurred. The first stage of research, therefore, is to produce data that specifically address this question. I believe that the broad regional patterns that we already have a basic understanding of, based on the work I've highlighted previously and others, are important and provide the necessary foundation. However, if we are to understand how communities of practitioners who are involved in the operationalizing of technological processes and creating technological devices combine known components and exploited certain phenomenon, we need to develop a concerted, multi-sighted, contextualized understanding with a high degree of chronological resolution.
[00:58:53.44] And I will conclude with that. Thank you very much.
[00:58:56.12] [APPLAUSE]