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Discovering
Eurasian Opportunities International Conference on Eurasian Archaeology by Gregory E. Areshian Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the first Russian emperor Peter the Great issued a special rex scriptum (royal decree) ordering meticulous recording of circumstances of archaeological finds, Russian, and consequently Soviet, archaeology has grown into a major domain of scholarship with scores of institutions and hundreds of archaeologists. Unfortunately, Soviet archaeologists have been separated from their West-European and American colleagues for many decades because of the political confrontation between East and West. Scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain strove to establish fruitful collaboration. During the early 1970s, Giorgio Buccellati made a courageous effort to establish an American field project in Georgia and Armenia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, immense territories of Eurasia encompassing one-sixth of the Earth with tens of thousands of sites became accessible to Western archaeologists and a new era of interaction with the Russian archaeological tradition is beginning to unfold. The University of Chicago's Department of Anthropology held an international conference on Eurasian archaeology, titled "Beyond the Steppe and the Sown: Integrating Global and Local Visions," on May 3 and 4. A broad spectrum of theoretical approaches was represented at the conference. Two lectures clearly demonstrated that cultural-historical concepts, being combined with processualism, are producing epistemologically important results. One by David Anthony focused on the stability of cultural frontiers in Eurasia stipulated by ecological borders and specific types of economies during the third and second millennium BC; the other (Leonid Yablonsky) demonstrated an impressive congruence of changes in archaeological as semblages with changes in physical-anthropological types of population in the region of the Aral Sea between Central Asia and Kazakhstan during the Iron Age. Discussing Southern Siberian artifacts found inside ancient Dynastic Chinese borders (from Xia Dinasty through Western Zhou), Katheryn Linduff presented a case study of harmonious integration of cultural-historical and contextual approaches. Philip Kohl discussed possibilities of applying anthropological models to interactions of Caucasia and Central Asia with ancient Near East during the Bronze Age. Alexander Bauer and I explored new perspectives arising from the application of semiotic principles to archaeological data. The preliminary results of several broad-scale field projects carried out in different regions, from the borders of the Near East and the Black Sea to the Pacific, were presented. Chronologically they cover a time-span from Late Middle Paleolithic of Western Georgia to Early Medieval Khazar nomads in the steppes of Southeastern Europe. The ArAGATS project in Armenia combines a detailed regional survey with systematic excavations at several sites aiming at a reconstruction and interpretation of the growth of complex societies in Late Bronze Caucasia (15001100 BC). Since the archaeology of nomadism occupies center stage in Eurasian prehistory and history, it is only natural to see expanding interest in ancient sites in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Djungaria. Two regional archaeology field projects devoted to the study of copper metallurgy and metalworking circa 35001000 BC in the Southern Ural and Middle Volga regions impressively integrate survey, excavations of individual sites, and a variety of scientific methods aimed at a reconstruction of paleocultural landscape and social context of Bronze Age metallurgy in a major area between steppe and forest zones. New results from applications of scientific methods in archaeology were included in two groups of papers. An old dilemmawhether in specific cases cultural changes were brought forth by local innovations or were results of external sociocultural impact was discussed in several presentations. Other papers presented art-historical interpretations of Eurasian archaeological artifacts. The conference demonstrated that the current stage of Eurasian archaeology can be characterized as a period of integration of American and Western European archaeological traditions with the archaeology of the former Soviet Union. However, spatial limits perceived as coinciding with the borders of the former USSR are quite irrelevant to archaeological realities of the past. The conference itself started a process of geographical redefining by incorporating Northwestern China and Mongolia within the Eurasian framework. Now it is natural to expect Caucasian archaeology to get back where it belongs, that is to become a substantial organic part of Ancient Near Eastern and Classical archaeologies. The archaeology of Central Asia, absorbing archaeologies of Northeastern Iran and Afganistan, could become an autonomous area of Old World archaeology. The future will tell if such a redefining will take place. Gregory E. Areshian is a research associate of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. He can be reached at ioapubs@ucla.edu. |