Agenda

Environments and States in East Asia Lecture Series

"Reduction of Silk Road exchange corresponds with a decrease in hydraulic output of major dryland rivers in northwest China"

Li Kangkang 
Wuhan University, China

Abstract:
The Silk Road traversed diverse and challenging landscapes, with one of its most characteristic stretches spanning the extremely arid Tarim Basin of northwestern China. The meandering paths of trade routes gradually developed from ancient corridors of diffusion into organised and government-regulated commerce by roughly two millennia ago, institutions that remained in use until the sixteenth century. Our understanding of what caused the reduction of Silk Road trade remains limited. Conventional theories tend to take socioeconomic perspectives, particularly relying on political transformations in the Eurasian heartland and a redirection towards maritime routes. This presentation aims to examine a potential role for hydro-environmental factors in the decline of the long-distance trade networks by compiling a unique landscape-scale dataset, contributing to what may have been a complex set of compounding variables.

Li Kangkang, Associate Professor of Environmental Archaeology and Geoarchaeology at the Department of Archaeology, School of History, Wuhan University, China.

Kangkang received his PhD in Quaternary Geology from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and completed his postdoctoral research at CAS, Queen’s University Belfast, and Wuhan University, respectively. As an experienced geologist and environmental archaeologist, he has carried out field surveys in Chinese deserts over ten years. His research focuses on a better understanding of human-environment interaction in the drylands of the Asian interior from the Pleistocene to the late Medieval period, using multi-disciplinary techniques and theories. His research aims to place these desert-oasis communities within the context of dynamic landscape changes and alterations in natural resource availability.

This lecture is part of the Environments and States in East Asia Lecture Series organised by NICHE in collaboration with the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice