NARSS: Kate Franklin, ‘Living the Silk Road everyday: archaeological research in medieval Armenia’

Date/Time

26/02/2020 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Event Information

How do we live global cultures in the everyday? This talk will look briefly at my research in Armenia and explore how the everyday and the global were co-constructed in the middle ages (12th to 15th centuries  AD). I will lay out the question of a ‘Silk Road archaeology’ as a scalar problem, and think through the ‘worlds’ at different scales made in text, landscape, architecture, and material culture. I will focus on survey and excavations centered on the Arai-Bazarjuł caravanserai, an inn built in the early 13th century to house travelers, and a place where local and global ‘spent the night together.’ The talk will range over a number of methodologies; ultimately however, I return to the scale of human embodiment as a way to think about how multiple scales of worlding are made commensurate through the mediations of bodily mobility and memory. 

Event Details

SpeakerKate Franklin
HostDepartment of Archaeology
VenueMeston MT6, University of Aberdeen