BKS-CCAF Talk on The Making of the Silk Roads: How nomads with metals created the foundations of the first global economic network

This Joint BKS-CCAF Talk will be delivered by Miljana Radivojević who is a Lecturer in Archaeomaterials at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

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 and the inventiveness of steppe nomads, 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 scale and networks of ores and metal supply, long before silk was in vogue.

Registration link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJApc-2oqTwuG937sDqPqVjJLHW8vTVJj_ly

Everyone is welcome.

CCAF: https://centralasia.group.cam.ac.uk/
BKS: https://www.bksoc.org.uk/education-comittee