Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T21:28:03.304Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Against the Mane: How Barbaric Was the ‘The Golden Age of Barbarians’?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2019

Joshua Wright
Joshua Wright*
Affiliation:
Department of ArchaeologyUniversity of AberdeenSt Mary's Elphinstone Road Aberdeen AB24 3UFUK Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Against the Grain is both a wide-ranging voyage of discovery and a regionally focused study of the trajectory of agriculture from its earliest appearance until historical times, coupled with discussion of the mechanisms that maintained early states. For Scott, the state is a fragile entity (pp. 21, 23, 118, 125) based on the production of grain, along with water transport, city walls, tax collection, specialized administrators, monumental centres, kings, social hierarchy, filth, epidemic disease and an insatiable demand for enslaved labour. With such a definition, there is a little hope that the societies of Eurasian pastoral nomads can be seen as anything other than ‘barbarians’ living outside the laws and hierarchies of agricultural states. It is these Eurasian nomadic pastoralists and their relations with the state that will form the focus of this commentary.

Type
Review Symposium
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 712 - 714
Copyright
Copyright © McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahrens, B., 2016. First results of a landscape-archaeological study in the upper Orkhon Valley, central Mongolia, in Ancient Cultures of Mongolia, Baikal Siberia and Northern China. (Reports VII, International Scientific Conference, Krasnoyarsk, October 3–7 2016. Part 2.) Krasnoyarsk: Siberian Federal University, 305–15.Google Scholar
Barfield, T.J., 1981. The Hsiung-Nu imperial confederacy: organization and foreign policy. Journal of Asian Studies 41, 45–61.Google Scholar
Barfield, T.J., 1989. The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic empires and China. Cambridge (MA): Blackwell.Google Scholar
Batsaikhan, Z., 2011. The Xiongnu – progenitors of the classical nomad civilization, in Xiongnu Archaeology: Multidisciplinary perspectives of the first Steppe Empire in Inner Asia, eds. Brosseder, U. & Miller, B.K.. Bonn: Vor- und Frühgeschichtliche Archäologie, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 121–6.Google Scholar
Brosseder, U. & Miller, B.K., 2011. Xiongnu Archaeology: Multidisciplinary perspectives of the first Steppe Empire in Inner Asia. Bonn: Vor- und Frühgeschichtliche Archäologie, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.Google Scholar
Honeychurch, W., 2015. Inner Asia and the Spatial Politics of Empire. New York (NY): Springer.Google Scholar
Hüttel, H.-G. & Erdenebat, U., 2010. Karabalgasun and Karakorum. Two late nomadic urban settlements in the Orkhon Valley. Ulaanbaatar: Admon.Google Scholar
Kradin, N.N., 2005. Social and economic structure of the Xiongnu of the Trans-Baikal region. Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 21, 79–86.Google Scholar
Kradin, N.N. & Ivliev, A.L., 2008. Deported nation: the fate of the Bohai people of Mongolia. Antiquity 82, 438–45.Google Scholar
Kradin, N.N., Ivliev, A.L., 2014. Истопия Киданьской Империи ляо [History of the Khitan Liao Empire]. Moscow: Nauka.Google Scholar
Kradin, N.N., Ivliev, A.L., Ochir, A., Vasiutin, S., Satantseva, S., Kovychev, E.V. & Erdenebold, L., 2014. Emgentiin Kherem, a fortress settlement of the Khitans in Mongolia. The Silk Road 12, 89–97.Google Scholar
Lattimore, O., 1940. Inner Asian Frontiers of China. New York (NY): American Geographical Society.Google Scholar
Mackerras, C., 1973. The Uighur Empire According to T'ang Dynastic Histories: A study in Sino-Uighur relations 744-840 (2nd edn). Columbia (SC): University of South Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Nissen, H.J., 1980. The mobility between settled and non-settled in early Babylonia: theory and evidence, in L'archéologie de l'Iraq du début de l’époque néolithique à 333 avant notre ère, ed. Barrelet, M.T.. Paris: CNRS, 285–90.Google Scholar
Park, J.-S., Gelegdorj, E. & Chimiddorj, Y.-E., 2010. Technological traditions inferred from iron artefacts of the Xiongnu Empire in Mongolia. Journal of Archaeological Science 37, 2689–97.Google Scholar
Sasada, T. & Chunag, A., 2014. Iron smelting in the nomadic empire of Xiongnu in ancient Mongolia. ISIJ International 54, 1017–23.Google Scholar
Shelach, G., 2000. The earliest Neolithic cultures of Northeast China: recent discoveries and new perspectives on the beginning of agriculture. Journal of World Prehistory 14, 363–413.Google Scholar
Sneath, D., 2007. The Headless State. New York (NY): Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Wittfogel, K.A. & Feng, Chia-sheng, 1949. History of Chinese Society: Liao, 907–1125. (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 36.) Philadelphia (PA): American Philosophical Society.Google Scholar
Wright, J., Honeychurch, W. & Chunag, A., 2009. The Xiongnu settlements of Egiin Gol, Mongolia. Antiquity 83, 372–87.Google Scholar