Kate Franklin Alanna L . Warner-Smith
Abstract
While movement is fundamental to processes that archaeologists study, it also poses some of the greatest challenges: material records—in their many manifestations—rely on stasis as well as movement. Approaching movement entails engaging with scalar problems, as archaeologists “move” between isotopes, populations, artifacts, skeletal remains, infrastructures, texts, subjects and authors, and landscapes. We propose an exploration of the body and embodiment as entry-points into such interpretive challenges. Might the body be a locus at which wildly disparate scales intersect and can be made commensurate? Archaeologists are increasingly theorizing movement and mobility in their analyses of people and things. While engagements with the “new materialism” invite an exploration of the ways in which materials and substances are in flux, studies of globalization and the Anthropocene attend to global flows of people and things. The embodied subject—one that moves, perceives, dreams, does—adds another interpretive challenge in archaeological knowledge-making practices. Perceptions and experiences were not only situated in past bodies, but the reconstruction of those experiences is also situated in the embodied practices of archaeologists. We invite papers spanning geographic and temporal contexts (including archaeologies of the contemporary and of the Anthropocene, as well as archaeologies of the deeper past) that engage with the body, scale, and archaeological knowledge-making practices. How might archaeologists understand the ways in which movement sediments in objects, bodies, and landscapes? How might we (re)-locate scalar knowledge of global precarity in bodies? Will this (re)-situating help to untie snarls of universalism, and tie scalar ties?
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Early results of research into trade routes and political economy of medieval north Armenia
2014
Kate Franklin
Abstract
This paper presents the preliminary results of archaeological research focused on political economy within the Kasakh Valley and the Armenian Highlands during the medieval period. Data from archaeological survey are compared with historical descriptions and information from architectural inscriptions in order to develop an understanding of the relationship between the archaeological landscape and medieval political economy. This project investigates how political changes in the Armenian highlands, such as the rise to power of the Vachutyans and other nobility, were related to trade relationships through the highlands at that time. The Kasakh valley was chosen for this project in order to better understand to the trade route which passed through the valley: this route is attested for the Roman and late medieval eras through documents and monuments. Archaeological and topographic data are integrated within a GIS database, enabling spatial analyses of the Kasakh valley archaeological landscape as a whole. These analyses observe changes over time in the structure and relationships of this landscape: between settlements, monasteries, fortresses, and the trade route(s). The analyses address the question: how did political economy and landscape interact in the Kasakh valley, as local nobility created their power out of changing ideas about the world and the movement of people and goods through it.
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A House for Trade, a Space for Politics: Excavations at the Arai-Bazarjugh Late Medieval Caravanatun, Armenia
2014
Kate Franklin
Abstract
According to predominant approaches to the Late Medieval historical and material record, Europe, the Near East and Eurasia were progressively integrated during the Late Medieval period by communities of style and networks of trade, as well as by political ties. Yet the mechanisms of trade and mobility – that is, the movement of people and materials – during this period remain largely unknown,as well as the rami Þcations of such regional or even ‘global’ economy on local society and politics.The late medieval princedoms of the Armenian Highlands were political entities operating within and between the states of Europe and Asia; the highland princedoms therefore provide an opportunity to examine regional political economy from the perspective of local interests. This paper presents results from excavations at the late medieval (12th-15th c. AD) Arai-Bazarjugh caravanatun (“caravan house”or road inn, also caravanserai), which was constructed by a local Armenian merchant-prince. The architecture of the caravanatun and the material assemblages recovered within it, integrated with historical data, demonstrate the role of the caravanatun as a point of intersection between the global trends of late medieval trade, and local Armenian political traditions.
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