The Making of the Silk Roads: Bronze Age Metallurgy in the Eurasian Steppe

The sixth seminar in the UCL Institute of Archaeology Research Seminar series for Term I, 2018/19 will be given by Miljana Radivojevic on 12 November.

Miljana's seminar is entitled 'The Making of the Silk Roads: Bronze Age Metallurgy in the Eurasian Steppe' and all are welcome to attend.

Abstract

The Eurasian Steppe has been increasingly recognised as the place where fundamental technologies, languages and ideas originated and spread from Bronze Age onwards. The intricate system of trade networks at the time paved the way for the routes that long outlived the Bronze Age world, the Silk Roads. Of all items transported along these routes, the exchange of ores and metal objects would have been the largest in volume and the most fundamentally transformative for the steppe communities. The prehistory of the Silk Road is therefore intimately related to that of the steppe metallurgy, leading the field of study of its origins at the crossroads of archaeology and materials science research. The most recent archaeometallurgical studies shed new light on the origins, scale and networks of ores and metal supply long before silk was in vogue.

UCL Institute of Archaeology Research Seminars Programme | Term I, 2018/19

Mondays, 4pm, Room 612 (some titles are still provisional)

• 1 October: Andrew Reynolds (World Archaeology) - The non-urban revolution: reflections on the idea of the town in early medieval Britain
• 8 October: Andrew Bevan (Archaeological Sciences) - Food storage and its cultural consequences across pre-industrial Europe
• 15 October: Gersande Eschenbrenner-Diemer (World Archaeology) - The TRACER Project: two years after. Results and Perspectives
• 22 October: Sefryn Penrose (Heritage Studies) - My Margaret Thatcher Museum: from the archaeology of the postindustrial to the archaeology of the neoliberal

• 29 October: Rachael Sparks (World Archaeology) - The Necessities of Death? Canaanite Funerary Patterns and Practice at Bronze Age Tell el-'Ajjul

  [5 November: Reading Week - no seminar]

• 12 November: Miljana Radivojevic (Archaeological Sciences) - The Making of the Silk Roads: Bronze Age Metallurgy in the Eurasian Steppe
  
• 19 November: Jonathan Gardner (Heritage Studies) - What is to become of the Crystal Palace? Excavating the afterlives of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its building
• 26 November: Michael Charlton (Archaeological Sciences) - Ironmaking practice at Meroe, Sudan
  
• 3 December: Hana Morel (Heritage Studies) - Global challenges, governance and heritage
• 10 December: Dean Sully (Heritage Studies) - Punk Conservation: resolving the no future approach to conserving the past