Nomadic Empires Research
Nomadic empires, imperial formations built by expansionist horse-riding non-sedentary societies such as the Xiongnu, Mongols and Comanches, are an important theme in world history. The period spanning from the fourth century BCE to the late nineteenth century CE witnessed the rise and fall of several expansionist equestrian confederations and steppe empires that profoundly shaped historical developments, often on continental and sometimes on hemispheric scales.
Yet, nomadic empires are often seen as marginal or secondary historical phenomena, subordinate to agrarian- and industrial-based empires and states whose ambitions and actions take precedence in the existing explanations of large-scale historical processes. Although the rise of world history as a distinctive and thriving field of historical inquiry has drawn increasing attention to nomadic empires in recent years, the scholarship has not kept pace with the growing interest. This has resulted in a representational discrepancy: Powerful nomad-based polities now figure prominently in world history textbooks and curricula, but the content is often outdated; old misconceptions and biases prevail, distorting not only the notions of nomadic societies but historical development itself.
This project aims to reinvigorate the study of nomadic empires by developing new theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of expansionist nomadic societies, their borderlands and relations with sedentary agrarian societies and other nomadic groups, and their historical influence. Collectively, these objectives amount to a historiographical intervention that has the potential to profoundly reshape how world history is written, taught and understood.
Nomadic Empires Project
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Digitizing Patterns of Power – Cartographic Communication
for Digital Humanities
Abstract
The representation of space in medieval texts, the appropriation of land and the subsequent installation of new structures of power are central research topics of the project “Digitizing Patterns of Power” (DPP). The project focuses on three regional case studies: the Eastern Alps and the Morava-Thaya region, the historical region of Macedonia, and historical Southern Armenia. DPP is a multidisciplinary project, conducted by the Austrian Academy of Sciences the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO) in cooperation with the University of Vienna, Department of Geography and Regional Research. It is part of an initiative to promote digital humanities research in Austria. DPP brings together expertise from historical and archaeological research as well as cartography and geocommunication to explore medieval geographies. The communication of space, time and spatial interconnectivity is an essential aspect of DPP. By incorporating digital cartographic expertise, relevant facts can be depicted in a more effective visual form. Optimal cartographic visualization of base data as well as the historical and archaeological information in an interactive map-based online platform are important features. However, the multidisciplinary of the project presents the participants with various challenges. The different involved disciplines, among them cartography, archaeology and history each have their own approaches to relevant aspects of geography and geocommunication. This paper treats geocommunication characteristics and approaches to interactive mapping in a historical and archaeological context within a multidisciplinary project environment. The fundamental challenges of cartographic communication within DPP will be presented. Furthermore, recent results on the communication of historical topographic, as well as uncertain thematic content will be demonstrated.
PDF Copy Here
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Mihailo St. Popović (Principal Investigator of DPP, Vienna, Austria)
Introduction
The project “Digitising Patterns of Power: Peripheral Mountains in the Medieval World”,1 which is abbreviated DPP in the following, is funded within the programme “Digital Humanities: Langzeitprojekte zum kulturellen Erbe” of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna for the duration of four years (from 1 January 2015 until 31 December 2018). It is hosted at the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO)2 of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and unites as a digital cluster project 3 various scholars from the fields of Medieval History, Byzantine
Studies, Historical Geography, Archaeology, Geography, Cartography, Geographical Information Science (GISc) and Software Engineering.
In order to achieve the aims of the project the Team Institute for Medieval Research (Austrian Academy of Sciences) is cooperating with an external project partner, namely the Team Department of Geography and Regional Research of the University of Vienna (Professor Dr Karel Kriz).4
In the year 2015 four case studies on the Middle Ages have begun to furnish insights in the development and sustainment of power in a spatial context.5
These four case studies were “The Carolingian Eastern Alps (8th–9th cent.)” [in the project’s course entitled “The Agilolfingian and Carolingian Eastern Alps (8th–9th cent.)”] (Katharina Winckler), “The March/Morava – Thaya/Dyje Border region (7th–11th cent.)” (Stefan Eichert), “The Historical Region of Macedonia (12th–14th cent.) – The Transformation of a Medieval Landscape” (Mihailo St. Popović) and “Historical Southern Armenia: the ‘Rise and Fall’ of Vaspurakan (5th– 11th cent.)” (Johannes Preiser-Kapeller).
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Approaches to understanding provincial structure in the early Islamic Caucasus: Historic Landscape Characterisation in the Kura plain
Paul Wordsworth
Proceedings of the Workshop held at 10th ICAANE in Vienna, April 2016
“The modern town of Bərdə at the heart of the Kura Plain in the Republic of Azerbaijan betrays almost no evidence of its historical political significance. This lowland area, a strategic frontier zone of the early Islamic world, has the potential to reveal a great deal about the structure of borderlands under the Abbasid caliphate (AD 750–1258) and its successors. In order to unravel the deep history of Bərdə, however, it is necessary to understand the long processes of change that have created the current landscape. This paper proposes the adaptation of techniques commonly used for landscape analysis in Western Europe to undertake a multi-scalar reconstruction of Bərdə (medieval Bardhaʿa) and its hinterland. Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) offers the opportunity to identify the traces of past spatial organisation through remote sensing and comprehensive aerial mapping. Furthermore, the method can be used to study towns, villages and rural structure in a comparable manner, rather than focussing solely on the configuration of extra-urban areas. While the intensive agricultural policies and urban redevelopment of the late Soviet Union present different challenges to those confronted by the numerous UK HLC projects, this case study demonstrates the value of this approach in understanding landscapes of the former USSR and in ecological zones where nomadic pastoralist economies played a significant role in the past.”