Moving Subjects, Situated Memory: Thinking and Seeing Medieval Travel on the Silk Road
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Moving Subjects, Situated Memory: Thinking and Seeing Medieval Travel on the Silk Road Kate Franklin 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Using a brief experiment in GIS, this article explores the relationship between showing and knowing in archaeology, and the relationship between seeing and understanding in medieval and modern ideas about landscape. The experiment plays with recreating the travel ‘mnemonic-scape’ along a section of medieval (thirteenth-fifteenth CE centuries) mountain highway, along a branch of what is now called “the Silk Road” located in the center of the modern Republic of Armenia. Ultimately, I argue for GIS mapping as one among multiple tools to be used to think playfully about historical experiences of space and movement, and about the critical link between vision, commemoration, and memory in the construction of social landscapes. Keywords GIS . Movement . Memory . Medieval . Silk road . Armenia
Near the heart of archeological interest in landscape is an argument that people in the past negotiated their social worlds at scales greater than the artifact or the site, and further, that these spaces were perceived, encountered, remembered and made meaningful through the situated, embodied experience of humans in motion. I start with these basic definitions so that I can support two linked premises; first, that what we currently refer to as the medieval (tenth to fifteenth centuries CE) “Silk Road” was a nested, overlapping assemblage of Eurasian landscapes. The second premise is that the global phenomena of trade and exchange which made up Silk Road culture in the middle ages were mediated by construction of and movement through these landscapes. These premises challenge archaeologists of the medieval Silk Road to conceive of the route not as lines on a map but as landscapes, and prompt us to think about the experience and representation of space as part of the material culture that made up the Silk Road world. I treat this challenge as an invitation to apply techniques of
* Kate Franklin [email protected]
1
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London, Room G14, 26 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DQ, UK
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
modeling and representation in GIS to draw landscape and memory into the archaeological reconstruction of the Silk Road. I am motivated by arguments within the developing field of Digital Humanities that we can, and should, use tools like GIS to do something other than create more accurate representations of “real” physical environments–that in fact, heuristic or what has been called playful uses of GIS can help us think about the role of movement, perception, and memory in the construction, experience, and imagining of medieval route landscapes (Morgan 2017; Nowviskie 2010; Tenen 2018). Historical evidence left by medieval travelers suggests that they were not only aware of the landscapes through which they traveled, but also that the memory of these spaces sha
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