Nomadic Cities and Network Modularity: Scalar Analysis in Ancient Urbanism and Social Connectivity

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The discovery of small to mid-sized cities (Tashbulak and Tugunbulak) built by the Qarakhanids (ninth–twelfth century CE) at high elevation illustrates that urban centers used by nomadic khanates may have operated under a unique model of “modular” urbanism, which we define as a hybridized form of urban development and nomadic kinship structure, wherein cities and towns functioned as economic, political, and religious nodes within highly “modular” systems. Unlike better known “nodal models” for oasis cities, these high-altitude centers acted as the crossing points for a much larger, dispersed nomadic population (who were not necessarily living in the town/city itself). Modularity here is used to mean that regional power was generated through scalable clusters of connectivity between diverse urban transfer-hubs, where power, wealth, etc., helped define wider communities of participation and enabled network growth without significant population pressure in the towns themselves. As such, the growth or decline of particular centers (within a module) might not change quantitatively the overall functionality of the cluster, unless broader systemic connectivity expanded or collapsed. This paper explores this conceptual turn in understanding Silk Road cities and towns, and illustrates preliminary results on modeling how modular urbanism might have functioned in Medieval Central Asia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33310