Take a look at the exciting CCES-related spring courses, listed here!

For more information, visit empireshadow.uchicago.edu

Jeffrey Winters 

Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

Director of Equality Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS), Northwestern University

Curriculum Vitae: http://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/expertAddInfo.asp?u_id=2615

Faculty page: http://www.polisci.northwestern.edu/people/core-faculty/jeffrey-winters.html

EDGS site: http://www.edgs.northwestern.edu

NOTE: Dr. Anatoly Khazanov’s talk has been rescheduled for Autumn Quarter 2016. Check back for further details!

Joshua Wright (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Brown bag talk: “Community and Authority in Bronze Age Mongolia”
16 November, 12:20-1:20 pm, Wieboldt 408
jointly sponsored by the Departments of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

NEW LOCATION: ROSENWALD 015

Silk Routes Rewoven: Inner Asia at 4000 and 1000 years ago
Michael Frachetti
Washington University in St Louis

Tuesday November 3, 2015
6-7:30 pm
NEW LOCATION: ROSENWALD 015

This lecture presents two parallel snapshots of “Silk Road” interaction.  The first snapshot comes from Bronze Age archaeological investigations in Southeastern Kazakhstan (ca. 2500 cal BCE), which reveal the earliest known evidence for interaction networks between East Asia and SW Asia. Such networks are attested in the form of early domesticated grains, which trace the introduction of wheat and barley to China as well as millet into Central and SW Asia.  The second snapshot explores the Silk Routes during the height of their use in the Medieval era and examines the formation of complex political and economic landscapes in Southeastern Uzbekistan.  As both cases are drawn from “nomadic” contexts, they require us to reevaluate the models for social complexity and institutional organization that shape both common and academic ideas about the world’s most extensive ancient overland trade network.

Nomads, Networks, and Political Complexity in the Ancient Near East

Instructors: Richard Payne and Emily Hammer

Course Number: CDIN 40024/ NEAA 49924/ NEHC 40024/ ANTH 46425/ HIST 58003

This course draws on archaeological and historical approaches to examine pastoral nomadism in the ancient Near East. Historians and archaeologists increasingly acknowledge the central role pastoralists and nomads played in the development of cities, states, and empires, as well as the dynamism and complexities of transhumant societies that traditionally figured only marginally in their accounts. The course re-centers the historical perspective through a focus on mobile groups in the geographical and cultural interstices of traditional civilizational “centers.” It insists on the interdependence of historical and archaeological forms of analysis to the recovery of pastoral nomadic societies, economies, and political cultures. The comparative invisibility of nomads and pastoralists in literary and material cultures poses interpretive problems that the seminar seeks to address. On the one hand, archaeologists have innovated a range of approaches to document the activities of mobile groups that often avoided the very nucleation once considered a defining feature of civilization. On the other hand, historians have begun to transcend the sedentary civilizational perspective of their sources to place texts in conversation with material culture. Our aim is to bring together these methods to produce accounts of nomadic civilizations that are simultaneously archaeological and historical. We will also explore the tensions between interpretations drawn from historical accounts and ideas generated via ethnographic analogies. The seminar will discuss recent work emphasizing the economic, social, and political complexity of mobile pastoral groups, and the diversity of nomadic pastoral practices and nomad-sedentary relations in the past, while inviting the students to produce issue-oriented papers on various debates in the field.