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Presented By: Museum of Anthropological Archaeology

The Valley as the City: Extended Pastoral Urbanism in the Inner Asian Steppe

Dr. Bryan Miller Research Affiliate – University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology

Despite productive developments in comparative studies of early urbanism, mobile pastoral societies of the steppe continue to receive cursory attention and constructed ‘urban’ centers are persistently deemed incompatible with mobile lifeways and pastoral economies. Sites with prominent buildings and production facilities in Inner Asia, however, evidence the development of permanent centers of intensive social, economic, and ritual activities among steppe pastoralists. Through remains of the first ‘proto-urban’ establishments of the first steppe empire (the Xiongnu, ca. 200 BCE - 100 CE), I argue here that the components and arrangements of these urban settings would have been structured according to the logistical and social parameters of large herds and small-holder herding households that made up the majority of the populations that moved though and occupied such centers in the steppe. This study thus adapts concepts of ‘low-density’ urbanism and fluctuating ‘urban sprawls’ to formulate a model of extended pastoro-urban landscapes – a lattice of monumental structures as well as permanent workshops, corralling and pasturing spaces, and fluid yet structured residential areas, equally defined by natural geography and built environments.

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