Walled Sites beyond the Wall: Labeling Liao Towns in Archaeology and Historical Geography

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Medieval Eurasian Steppe Urbanism" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the course of its 200+ year tenure the Kitan-Liao dynasty (907–1125) saw large migrations, intensification of settlements, and widespread construction of walled sites of varying sizes north of the Great Wall (N41°+) across the grassland ecotones of North Asia. The remains of some 650 such walled sites are distributed across Inner Mongolia and the Northeastern Provinces (Dongbei) of the PRC, and eastern Mongolia. The number of such sites is over double that of settlements that are named and documented for the region in historical sources. One key reason for this discrepancy is the origin of historical sources as taxation records, when certain settlements may well have functioned outside of taxation systems, or have been constructed but never completed. The study of these Liao sites has been the task of primarily Sinophone archaeologists and historical geographers attempting to match the sites with textual references. This paper will explore the methods and evidentiary foundations of such scholarship and in particular how disputes play out in placing names to sites. Within such debates I will reveal how settlement scale and population migrations are understood when texts encounter archaeology in primarily Chinese-language publications.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology of Medieval Eurasian Steppe Urbanism   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36491.0