From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Scholarly interest has been growing regarding trans-Eurasian exchange of agricultural systems and tangible material goods in late prehistory. The trans-regional movement of certain artefact types, cereal crops and animals occurred within a series of transformative processes that brought together previously isolated communities across Eurasia to constitute a new kind of network. This process was at its height during the second/first millennium BC and discussions have centered on the timing and routes of those movements. In this symposium, we focus on the context. In particular, what were the intangible ideas that might be associated with the movement of tangible things in archaeological evidence. Why would one type of technology or idea be welcomed in one part of the world but rejected from another? Why ‘globalism’ is doomed to meet social conservatism?