Friday 25 July 2014

Reconfiguring the Silk Road: New Research on East-West Exchange in Antiquity

Reconfiguring the Silk Road

New research on East- West Exchange in Antiquity

(from the symposium in 2011)

by Colin Renfrew (Foreword), 
Victor H. Mair (Editor), 
Jane Hickman (Editor)


  • Hardcover: 136 pages
  • Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (5 Aug 2014)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1934536687


From the Bronze Age through the Middle Ages, a network of trade and migration routes brought people from across Eurasia into contact. Their commerce included political, social, and artistic ideas, as well as material goods such as metals and textiles. Reconfiguring the Silk Road offers new research on the earliest trade and cultural interactions along these routes, mapping the spread and influence of Silk Road economies and social structures over time. This volume features contributions by renowned scholars uncovering new discoveries related to populations that lived in the Tarim Basin, the advanced state of textile manufacturing in the region, and the diffusion of domesticated grains across Inner Asia. Other chapters include an analysis of the dispersal of languages across the Eurasian Steppe and a detailed examination of the domestication of the horse in the region. Contextualized with a foreword by Colin Renfrew and introduction by Victor Mair, Reconfiguring the Silk Road provides a new assessment of the intercultural evolution along the steppes and beyond. Contributors: David W. Anthony, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Dorcas R. Brown, Peter Brown, Michael D. Frachetti, Jane Hickman, Philip L. Kohl, Victor H. Mair, J. P. Mallory, Joseph G. Manning, Colin Renfre

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