Tag: Archaeology

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Why talk about the Silkroad in China?

Birgitta Hoffmann

This autumn our Silkroad course is going to visit a slightly unusual element within the Silkroad studies – the transport within China.
Why would this be so interesting? We all know, that the land route enters China at the Gansu Corridor by passing through a gate in the Great Wall. From there it moved on to Xi’an/Changan, the ancient capital of China. We also know that Guangzhou on the Pearl River is the oldest of the China Sea harbours that carried the Maritime trade on the Silk Route to and from the Harbours. Guangzhou is even far enough in the South that it acts as China’s Monsoon Trade harbour.

So far this is very easy and hardly surprising. The question is what happens then?
Xi’an/Chang’an ceases to be the capital of China in the late Tang period, when the capital moves East beyond the passes first to Luoyang, then to Kaifeng. Very soon afterwards you hear of other capitals, with Beijing, Nanjing and Hangzhou being probably the most famous sites.
If we assume that the high luxury items of the Silkroad trade were destined particularly for the court, these changes of capitals and the creation of multiple capitals, when China disintegrates over centuries means that a trade route ending in Xi’an is of little use to anybody.

Other problems are the imperial monopolies: Silk, salt and tea are legally only available through the imperial government. But the place where tea is grown and the place where the harbours are, are in the Tang period at the opposite ends of the Pearl River and a long way from Chang’an.

We also have to consider the massive distances involved: From Guangzhou to Kaifeng is 1500km with another 700km to reach Beijing. Shanghai is 900 km away, Dunhuang another 2000 km. None of these routes is easy, often crossing mountains, sometimes deserts and several huge rivers. Creating a viable road network was a century-long project which started with the Qin emperors and was added and adjusted as time and money permitted or demanded. Heavy, bulky or fragile goods were always at risk on the roads, whether transported by horses or by carts and thus not really useful to the Silkroad trader of fragile luxury items.

In response the Chinese developed a very efficient use of waterways. With long rivers like the Wei, the Pearl River and the Yangtse East-West transport was possible, if the various hazards to navigations could be mastered, but what if you needed to travel North-South or needed to cross between river systems, for example, to take the pottery from Jingdezhen or Changsha to Guangzhou?

In this course we will take a look on how these transport problems were mastered during the different dynasties and what this meant for long-distance traders who wanted to obtain goods from the interior of China but weren’t necessarily interested in travelling there themselves or even not permitted to do so.

The Silkroad course on China starts on Thursday 3 October.
Places for the course or for individual lectures can be booked from this webpage here or via Eventbrite here.

 

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Roman villas in Gaul and Germany: the homes of the invaders and fashion victims?

Birgitta Hoffmann

After spending a year looking at the amazing estate centres in the Mediterranean, 10 weeks talking about the villas in Gaul and Germany might seem somewhat of a letdown. So why do it? For starters,  they are by far the most common Roman site type in the area and the closest parallels to the villas we find in Roman Britain. The rural farm with its yard and little bath house is for much of Gaul the definition of what it means to be living in the Roman NW provinces.
And like the farms in the American Midwest, there is at times a certain repetitiveness in their design and aspirations. But they also document, how Rome transformed and frankly reconstructed the Iron Age landscapes after the wars of Julius Caesar and later the Civil War of the 69/70 CE. The result are thriving landscapes in the hinterland of Gall0-Roman Towns and later Roman forts.

The joy of these is, however, the diversity and the variety of research that has been conducted on them. Every region has their own idea of what a villa estate should look like, which might reflect the type of agriculture that was practised and perhaps even more interesting is the question how fast you see the development of different levels of wealth. The picture is the reconstruction of the Roman villa of Borg in Germany. It is without a doubt the villa of a member of the financial elite, but it comes from the area of the Treveri, where you see these large villas quite early, so where does the money come from? And who are the owners? In the territory of the Helvetii (in modern Switzerland), you have a landscape that was evacuated in the late Iron Age and then resettled leading to some villas that are best described as palaces or the centre of a small town, rather than a rural site, but there are plenty of pointers that suggest that in many cases these large villas were in the hands of the local elite and increasingly we find that these sites continue  Iron Age settlements.

But we also find areas like Cologne where many of the villas may have been in the hands of retired Roman soldiers (who at this point are likely to have been born in Northern Italy and the South of France). How does this differ from the ‘Romanised villas’ in Switzerland? And are there local people who refuse to live with underfloor heating and mosaics and why?

It is not surprising that these 200-year-long traditions of rural living come in many areas to an abrupt halt during the third century. The surviving sites change, but how do you continue to farm in the face of an unpredictable military and political situation and if you are one of the lucky rich ones, who may be working closely with the court at Trier, how do you adapt your villa to document this in the face of your neighbours?

As you can see, a lot of material and questions to cover and as to mosaics and the art – let’s just say, it is amazing what can survive a long way from Rome.

If you are interested, you can find further details about the course here.