Understanding cities in the premodern history of Northeast Asia, c. 200-1200

东北亚的历史鲜为人知，也有很多误解。今天，该地区是中国，蒙古，朝鲜和俄罗斯之间的接触区。现在，它是资源繁荣的中心，也是地区紧张局势的中心。在过去，它也一直是一个互动区。在中国和韩国的流行文化中，与该地区有关的游牧民族既被浪漫化，又被妖魔化。辽朝（907-1125年）及其亲属等植根于草原的政权出现在电影、电视剧和汽车广告中（www.youtube.com/watch? v=nWWKt9alpE4）。中国最近的东北计划利用历史证据声称，这里的政权依赖于“中华文明”，并从“中华文明”中衍生出来。中国的长城代表了“草原和播种”之间的鸿沟。但事实上，我们所知道的长城直到15世纪才建成，而整个地区的相互作用可以追溯到数千年前。东北亚人，无论是“农民”还是“游牧民”，从已知的最早时期起就做了许多相同的事情，其中之一就是使用城市。我们的记录表明，城市是使中国文明上级移动的的游牧社会的因素之一，但草原上也有城市：大的，小的，不总是有墙的，和中国帝国一样古老。如果中国和游牧民族都使用城市，那么他们可能比我们想象的更相似，但是“游牧民族”使用城市做同样的事情吗？是什么造就了一座城市，它们又是如何组织起来的？谁住在哪里，他们做了什么？城市的存在是否意味着国家的存在？墙是用来干什么的？本项目将通过在长期历史背景下设置新的物质证据来回答这些问题。历史传递着统治精英的观点，但来自社会各阶层的人们都生活在城市里，真实的故事发生在底层。通过比迄今为止更紧密地结合文本和考古方法，我们将提供新的证据来揭示内蒙古赤峰周围三个边境城市的日常生活模式，这些城市在大约200年至1200年期间被“定居”和“游牧”帝国使用。我们的项目由一位历史学家和一位考古学家共同指导，将使我们能够看到在不同类型的统治者下同一城市的变化活动。我们将收集赤峰地区及其城市在我们感兴趣的时期的稀疏文本记录，与定居和移动的政权的记录一起工作。这将提供一个政治和其他变化的年表，以比较不同层次的新考古证据。我们将使用地下技术-螺旋钻和磁力测量-来回答我们关于这些城市的物理形式的问题，这反过来又会为我们提供经济实践，权力关系，工业和工作，宗教和身份表达等历史问题的证据。我们将使用碳-14测试来确定我们发现的地层的日期，以便我们可以尽可能地将它们与文本证据进行比较，使这成为东北亚草原城市地层细节水平的第一项研究。我们的证据将为中国心脏地带以外的城市中心的日常生活提供最清晰的画面。这种更清晰的观点将挑战中国文化在这一地区的优势形象，要求我们重新思考东北亚地区各种群体之间的社会政治组织和互动，并将中国和草原置于更广阔的世界中。我们对这项研究的公开介绍将发挥拆除长城的想法，以达到尽可能广泛的受众。

Northeast Asia's history is little known and much misunderstood. In the present day this region is the contact zone between China, Mongolia, North Korea and Russia. Right now it is the centre of a resource boom and a locus for regional tensions. In the past, too, it was always a zone of interaction. The pastoral nomads who are associated with the region are both romanticised and demonised in Chinese and Korean popular culture. Regimes rooted in the grasslands, like the Liao dynasty (907-1125) and its kindred, feature in films, television dramas and car advertising (www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWWKt9alpE4). China's recent Northeast Project draws upon historical evidence to claim that regimes based here were dependent on and derived from 'Chinese civilisation'. The Great Wall of China represents this divide between 'steppe and sown'. But in truth, the Wall as we know it was not built until the 15th century, whereas interactions across this region go back thousands of years. Northeast Asians, whether 'farmers' or 'nomads', did many of the same things from the earliest known times, one of which was to use cities.Our records suggest that cities were one of the things that made Chinese civilisation superior to mobile pastoralist societies, but there were cities in the grasslands too: large, small, not always with walls, as old as Chinese empires. If cities were used by both Chinese and nomadic regimes, then they may have been more alike than we thought, but did 'nomads' use cities for the same things? What made a city and how were they organised? Who lived where and what did they do? Did the presence of cities mean the existence of a state? What were walls for?This project will answer these questions by setting new material evidence in a long-range historical context. History relays the views of ruling elites, but people from the full social range lived in cities, and the real story is at ground level. Through closer integration of textual and archaeological methods than has been achieved until now, we will supply fresh evidence to reveal previously unseen patterns of everyday life in three borderland cities around Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, which were used by both 'sedentary' and 'nomadic' empires in the period from about 200 to 1200.Our project, co-directed by a historian and an archaeologist, will enable us to see changing activities in the same cities under different types of rulers. We will assemble the sparse textual record for the Chifeng region and its cities in our period of interest, working with records of both sedentary and mobile regimes. This will provide a chronology of political and other changes against which to compare different layers of new archaeological evidence. We will use subsurface techniques - augering and magnetometry - to answer our questions about the physical form of these cities, which will in turn give us evidence for historical issues such as economic practices, power relations, industry and work, religion and expressions of identity. We will use Carbon-14 testing to date the layers that we find so that we can compare them as closely as possible to the textual evidence, making this the first study at this level of stratigraphic detail of Northeast Asian cities in grasslands locations. Our evidence will provide the clearest picture yet of everyday life in urban centres outside the Chinese heartlands. This sharper view will challenge the dominant image of the superiority of Chinese culture in this region, will require us to think again about socio-political organisation and interactions of all kinds between groups in Northeast Asia, and will locate both China and the grasslands within a wider world. Our public presentations of this research will play with the idea of demolishing the Great Wall as a way of reaching the widest possible audience.