Who were the urban Liao? - The cultural salience of ‘urban’ life in a mobile society

Summary

Recent insights into how urbanism and permanent settlements can function and be integrated into mobile societies has helped to overturn the notion that human societies ‘progress’ from mobile forms of production through irrigated agriculture to urbanism. Indeed the Liao Empire (907-1125CE) of Northeast Asia shows how these three modalities can coexist and be interdependent. City and kiln sites, standing architecture and tombs are distributed extensively through the former Liao territory, and yet in a society that encompassed sedentary and mobile populations the cultural salience of being ‘urban’ remains unexplored or presumed to be homologous to those of Tang (619-907) or Northern Song society (960-1125).

This paper uses textual geographical data found in published epigraphical and biographical sources from the Liao period, combined with the spatial and archaeological context of Liao epigraphy to map the movements of Liao elites over the landscape, as well as political relationships within networks of the Liao administrative geography, with an aim to elucidate what it meant to be ‘urban’ in the Liao.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Medieval Cities in the Eurasian Steppe   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15780