Eurasia 2025
“Movement and Infrastructure in Ancient Eastern Eurasia (1200 BCE - 300 CE)”
Interdisciplinary Workshop
Munich, May 14-16, 2025, 9:30-18:00
Abstract: From the 3rd Millennium BC onwards, interregional connections across Eastern Eurasia gradually intensified. Over the recent decades, we have seen a rapid increase in the number of archaeological finds that reflect these interactions, as well as the studies on specific forms and geographical frameworks of transregional connectivity. However, we still lack a holistic understanding of human and non-human agents, materials, skills, knowledge, and artifacts that moved across Eastern Eurasia, as well as the geography, resources, and driving forces of these movements. This interdisciplinary workshop will bring together scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America, including specialists in archaeology, archaeological science, epigraphy, history, and linguistic to take stock of the currently available sources and draw a broad picture of Early Eastern Eurasia as an interconnected space, focusing on the period between 1200 BCE and 300 CE but equally providing a diachronic perspective while looking into earlier and later periods.
Our goal is to understand how the movement of people, animals, plants, artifacts, technologies, and ideas became possible, given the combination of ecologies, resources, and social, cultural, and institutional settings. We also seek to trace the impact of movements on community and identity, power and inequality, political organization, and economy. Which geographic regions can be meaningfully identified as connecting spaces, notwithstanding the present-day national borders? Which groups or individuals can be tracked as particularly prone to movement? Which technologies and elements of material culture in the archaeological record can be regarded as proxies for human movement? Which non-human agents, including herded and draft animals, facilitated mobility? How did transportation infrastructure and technology evolve? How did early polities facilitate and regulate the movements of their agents and subjects? What happened to migrants in host societies? And how do we integrate observations from different kinds of evidence and varying methodologies into broader narratives of ancient movements? This is the range of questions our workshop is going to address.
Venue: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, Südliches Schloßrondell 23, 80638 München. (https://www.cfvss.de/). Registration is required.
Programme (coming soon)
Practical information for the participants and invited guests you find as PDF document here