By J. Daniel Rogers
Over the course of four field seasons, beginning in 2002, I had the good fortune to travel to Mongolia to study the architecture of the early empires. Some of the earlier blogs on the Rogers Archaeology Lab page describe the fun and challenges of traveling in Mongolia (Travels in Mongolia parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). The fieldwork I did there was part of my comparative study of how large social systems form and either stabilize or fall apart. Over the last few years I have written quite a bit about the early empires of Inner Asia. People living in these empires herded animals as their economic foundation and they usually lived in tents. This is very different from the early civilizations that first developed in China, the Middle East, South America, and Mesoamerica. All of these other places had agriculture as their economic foundation and people generally lived in villages, which later developed into cities. My most comprehensive overview of the Inner Asian empires, ranging from the Xiongnu (199 BCE to CE 155) to the Zunghar (CE 1625 to 1757) was published in the Journal of Archaeological Research (2012).
Although the people of Inner Asia generally lived in tents, when the first empires began to develop they also built a variety of buildings and other forms of architecture, especially settlements with defensive walls. Within the walls there was sometimes a palace or ordinary domestic dwellings, but generally the walls enclosed a large open space with no evidence of buildings. The open space was probably occupied by tent communities. This year (2017) the journal, Archaeological Research in Asia, published my study of the early architecture and how it related to the emergence and stability of empires. The full title and abstract are listed below.
This study is a culmination of my fieldwork in Mongolia and was only possible through the dedication and help of dozens of friends and colleagues. I like traveling in wide open places and sleeping in tents. I have had the good fortune to encounter many others who feel the same way.
Like any study, this one answers some questions while raising others. Stay tuned for future posts as the research continues.
Rogers, J. Daniel
2017 Inner Asian Polities and Their Built Environment. Archaeological Research in Asia 11:1-14, DOI 10.1016/j.ara.2017.03.002. Also published online at http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2352226716300630
Abstract
By 200 BCE the eastern steppe regions centered on Mongolia saw the development of expansive and complex political systems usually referred to as empires. The origins of these polities and the processes of consolidation can be described within the concept of a political community, reflecting the actions of competing groups in expansive social network. For Inner Asia, community was linked to issues of mobility, dispersed control hierarchies, and the economics of multi-resource pastoralism. Together, these patterns offer an alternative vision of the origin and operation of early complex polities. Archaeologically, the pastoralist way of using the built environment provides a window into the dynamics of political processes that operated within a particular polity, but also within multiple polities across long stretches of time. Based on a sample of 76 sites within 13 steppe polities several patterns emerge that highlight how distinctive political processes altered and incorporated community and place in the building of fortified settlements, palaces, military posts, and other constructions. The evidence from these places suggests that these polities operated as inclusive spatial networks that relied more on mobility than the direct interactions seen in urban centers in sedentary societies. The urban centers of the steppe tended to be the byproduct of polity formation, rather than the source.
Keywords
Inner Asia - Nomadic empires - Polity formation - Architecture - Urban centers
Rogers, J. Daniel
2012. Inner Asian States and Empires: Theories and Synthesis. Journal of Archaeological Research 20:205-256. doi:10.1007/s10814-011-9053-2.
Other Reading
Hanks, Brian
2010. Archaeology of the Eurasian steppes and Mongolia. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 469–486.
Honeychurch, William
2015. Inner Asia and the Spatial Politics of Empire. Springer, New York.