New special issue devoted to ancient Silk Roads and cultural contacts across Eurasia
BMFEA 75 – ”New Perspectives in Eurasian Archaeology”
Volume 75 of the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities is a special issue, ”New Perspectives in Eurasian Archaeology,” also the title of a IIAS-ASEF sponsored symposium at the Museum in late 2003 — in commemoration of the museum’s illustrious founder, Johan Gunnar Andersson, and his explorations of the archaeology of prehistoric East-West contacts and the fascinating issues regarding possible early relations between prehistoric East and central Asia. The volume is a contribution to the vibrant new research in this field.
BMFEA 75 contains the following original articles and reports:
– LI Shuicheng: Ancient Interactions in Eurasia and Northwest China: Revisiting Johan Gunnar Andersson’s Legacy;
– MEI Jianjun: Qijia and Seima-Turbino: The Question of Early Contacts Between Northwest China and the Eurasian Steppe;
– Louisa G. FITZGERALD-HUBER: The Qijia Culture: Paths East and West;
– Bo LAWERGREN: Western Influences on the Early Chinese Qin-Zither;
– YUAN Jing and Rowan FLAD: Two Issues Concerning Ancient Domesticated Horses in China;
– Donald B. WAGNER: The Earliest Use of Iron in China;
– CHEN Xingcan: Where Did the Chinese Leather Raft Come From? –A Forgotten Issue in the Study of Ancient East-West Cultural Interaction;
– CHOE Chong Pil: Some Problems Concerning Korean Dolmens in Eurasian Perspective;
– Evgeny BOGDANOV: The Origin of the Image of a Predator Rolling up in a Ring in the Portable Art of Central Asia;
– Nguyen Kim DUNG: Johan Gunnar Andersson’s systematic research on Fai Tsi Long Archipelago archaeology and the Andersson collections kept in Viet Nam;
– Nils RINGSTEDT: Swedish Archaeology and the Archaeology of Long-Distance Trade.
In addition, there is a separate article by Lucie OLIVOVA, ”Forgotten Bridges: Dulinqiao and Shanqiao in Southern Hebei, China,” which discusses bridges which are favorite symbols of cultural contact, thus very near the theme of the volume as a whole, evoking the BMFEA credo of ”Dialogue, not diatribe.”
The BMFEA is available for purchase from the MFEA, http://www.ostasiatiska.se, English section
National Geographic posted a brief piece on the butchered dog remains from David Anthony and Dorcas Brown’s work at Krasnosamarskoe in the Volga. You can read it at this link. They make the fascinating argument that the killing of dogs was part of rites of initiation into a cohort of warriors. If this is indeed that case, it would raise a number of interesting questions pertinent to the long-standing controversy surrounding Napoleon Chagnon’s ethnographic work with the Yanomami. If violence is socially inculcated within specific historical formations, as Anthony and Brown’s evidence suggests, then that would seem to close the chapter on the exaggerated claims of Chagnon’s initial study.
