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SUMMARY:Before the Silk Road: tracing the earliest East West contacts - Ma
 rtin Jones ( George Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science )
DTSTART:20120124T131000Z
DTEND:20120124T140000Z
UID:TALK35270@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Xinyi Liu
DESCRIPTION:The idea of a route of trade and exchange linking the Han Empi
 re with Classical Europe has been a fertile one for archaeologists across 
 the Old World.  Chinese silk is well attested in the Roman Empire\, and He
 llenistic influences are traced in Chinese artifacts.  Technological analy
 sis of bronze metalwork has pushed those contacts back into the 2nd millen
 nium BC.  Now a series of more elusive traces is pushing the dates of cont
 act back further still\, by centuries and in some cases\, millennia.\n\nTh
 ose earliest of contacts involved materially poor farmers\, and so cannot 
 be traced by rich graves and material wealth.  We have been using a range 
 of bio-archaeological approaches to trace and understand those earliest co
 ntacts\, that laid the foundation for the more visible trading routes of t
 he late prehistoric and historic periods.\n
LOCATION:Entertaining Room\, Darwin College
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