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. 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. 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. 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. 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. [APPLAUSE] 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. So as we get some
text here, that should start to populate
if it's working. Oh, there we go. Hey. Text you or-- 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. And I will conclude with that. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
