Traveling the Ancient Silk Road: Plants and Animals on the Trans-Eurasian Exchange Routes

NYU Anthropology, Kriser Auditorium, 6 PM

The trans-Eurasian exchange routes, which we colloquially call the Silk Road, are responsible for shaping cultures and the genetic makeup of peoples across Europe and Asia. The diffusion of farming and pastoralist peoples through the mountainous spine of Eurasia from the third millennium B.C. onward led to a mingling of agricultural traditions. Millets of East Asian origin were planted in fields next to wheat and barley of southwest Asian origins for the first time in the mountain valleys of Central Asia, these distinct crops would eventually facilitate the formation of seasonal crop-rotation systems. As organized trade routes formed, by at least two millennia ago, the spread of cultural memes increased, including specific grains, fruits, legumes, as well as animals, such as chickens, rats, and house mice. These plants and animals influenced the life of peoples on these ancient trade routes, and continue to impact all of our lives today. While previously overlooked, the movement of plants over vast distances was also responsible for pronounced genetic changes leading to domestication in rosaceous fruits, such as the apple, as well as the walnut – literally Silk-Road-driven evolution. Many of these plants and animals have remained largely invisible to archaeologists working in Central Asia, but modern scientific methods are allowing us to paint a more vibrant image of the ancient peoples that helped shape the modern world.

Biography

Robert Spengler III, PhD, is the head of Paleoethnobotany Laboratories & the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution research group at Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology.

I supervise a team of scholars and run a laboratory that leads the way in the archaeobotanical sciences. The members of Spengler Lab engage in two linked areas of study: the domestication and dispersal of crops in prehistory and early history. They Study the great trade routes of the ancient world, colloquially known as the Silk Road,and the ways that globalization fueled greater inequality, political development, and cultural change.They explore the links between the intensification of agriculture and the emergence of complex social systems. As a secondary branch of scholarship, my team is investigating changes in adaptations for seed dispersal during plant domestication.Specifically, we are rethinking domestication and focusing on an ecological approach.I maintain paleoethnobotanical studies at sites across Eurasia from Mongolia to Turkmenistan,as well as in East Asia, Europe, and North America.