Can you tell us about the seminar you’ll be teaching on ancient technologies?

I’m teaching Ancient Technology during the Fall quarter, since I expected to be in Pakistan during the Winter quarter (more on that below!). I’ve been pleased to get a mixture of students—the class currently has graduate students from programs in archaeology, history, Latin American studies, art history, and architecture. We use theoretical frameworks from various disciplines to talk about broad topics like labor, value and wealth, gender studies, material culture, craft specialization, cultural contact, and knowledge transmission. We also look at technology from the perspective of the craftspeople, especially the choices that they constantly had to make. I emphasize the latter approach by doing as much hands-on work as possible, rather unusual for a seminar. Right now we’re processing clay from a local source in the Botanical Gardens, to make it usable for pottery production. What I love most about this course is how much I learn from it, especially since every student has to do an independent project involving both the examination of a technology in its social setting, and hands-on experimental work. This project can be anything from the development of Chinese block-printing and the dissemination of religious literature to the experimental replication of burn marks on spit-roasted versus pit-roasted bones for interpretation of trash remains from a Southwestern archaeological site. The only given is that it’s almost always something I know nothing about.

Can you tell us about your project on Medieval Caravanserai Networks of South and Central Asia?

Caravanserai were stopping places along the caravan routes in the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and North Africa. The classic building structure is blocks of rooms opening into a central courtyard, rather like Buddhist or European monasteries, but completely walled off like a fort. They are most often associated with the overland Islamic trade and pilgrimage networks of the medieval period, although in fact they were used by people from a variety of religions. Caravans of merchants or pilgrims would rent rooms for the night (especially as secure places to store trade goods), the pack animals would stay in the courtyard, and the gates would be closed until morning, providing protection from bandits. The caravanserais usually had wells to provide water for both humans and animals, and most sold fodder, food, and fuel. Caravanserais were found in the middle of deserts (the most popular image), but they were also found in cities, often forming the nucleus of diaspora communities. They were the physical representation of the extensive networks of trade and pilgrimage that linked private individuals across political boundaries.

We chose to focus on the caravanserai and other travel amenities in northern Pakistan because here we can contrast caravanserais built by the imperial governments in the Punjab region with those built by towns, individuals, or perhaps trade guilds themselves in the Northwest Frontier Province, a region always divided between small kingdoms and tribal (clan) groups. The trade along the Grand Trunk Road from India to Afghanistan and beyond is thought to have been important for the political economy of many of the historic governments in this region. But there has been little archaeological work on the historic period for this region, and very little on caravanserais; only our extremely underfunded Pakistani colleagues managing to document the larger serais, often on their own time.

It is hard to predict exactly what will happen with the timing for our project. I have funding from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies to spend up to six months in Pakistan, setting up the project with my collaborators at the University of Peshawar and in Lahore and looking at collections and documented serais. I had planned to spend 3 months during the winter, then a few more in the summer, but AIPS, like Fulbright, has evacuated all their scholars from Pakistan until we can see what will happen. Tensions in this region are nothing new, and it was clear when I was setting up this project several years ago that there would be some sort of crisis in Afghanistan, probably spilling into Pakistan. That’s one of the reasons I chose to develop this project, instead of several other possibilities—it can be moved to any number of countries in the region. I hope that the region will become stable again within a year or so, perhaps even more stable than it has been the past few years. In the meantime, we have an extensive amount of historical data on caravanserai and trade routes to code into a GIS system for preliminary regional analysis. And, I have boxes of samples to analyze from my Indus pyrotechnological work, exported with an eye to just such a hiatus in fieldwork.