Landscapes of the Silk Road: Written, Imagined, and Embodied Spacetimes

Summary

This paper approaches Silk Road-scapes as imagined topographies, a particular inheritance of the medieval culture of travel, and of its representations of the world(s). How we imagine the ‘Silk Road’ landscape is therefore rooted in assumptions about categories and conditions of agency (social and historical), and about space. These include mobility, transcendence, and visibility—both in the landscape and in the record. Travel and cosmopolitan encounters along roads (Silk or otherwise) are chrono-topoi (spacetimes) which structure our historically-situated regard of spaces, such as mountain valleys and expansive deserts.

Working in local landscapes of medieval Armenia, I problematize the idea of Silk Road space, thinking not only about mobility and contact, but also about spaces of care, hospitality, and comfort. Critical to the theme of this session, these spaces and practices are gendered, embodied, they depend on vulnerable spacetimes and ‘quotidian’ actors, as well as particular ideas of ‘culture’ and ‘nature.’ In this paper I will explore how picking at the gendered structuring of Silk Road narratives both requires that we deploy archaeological data in different ways, and also leads to larger-scale untanglings of understandings about large-scale exchange, culture ‘contact’ and the distinctions between pre-modern and modern worlds.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 19973