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，这一地区是中国、蒙古、朝鲜和俄罗斯的接触区。目前，它是资源繁荣的中心，也是地区紧张局势的发源地。在过去，它也一直是一个互动的区域。在中国和韩国的流行文化中，与该地区相关的游牧民族既被浪漫化，也被妖魔化。植根于草原的政权，如辽朝(907-1125)及其亲属，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引用了历史证据，声称这里的政权依赖并起源于“中华文明”。中国长城就是这种“草原与播种”的分野。但事实上，我们所知的长城直到15世纪才建成，而这一地区的互动可以追溯到数千年前。东北亚人，无论是“农民”还是“游牧民族”，从已知的最早时代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，城市是使中国文明优于流动的牧民社会的因素之一，但草原上也有城市：有大有小，并不总是有城墙，与中国帝国一样古老。如果城市同时被中国人和游牧民族政权使用，那么它们可能比我们想象的更相似，但“游牧民族”用城市来做同样的事情吗？是什么造就了一座城市？它们是如何组织起来的？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？这个项目将通过在长期的历史背景下设置新的材料证据来回答这些问题。历史传递着统治精英的观点，但来自整个社会范围的人生活在城市里，而真正的故事发生在基层。通过考古学和考古学方法的更紧密结合，我们将提供新的证据来揭示内蒙古赤峰周边三个边疆城市以前未见过的日常生活模式，这三个城市在大约200年到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，将使我们能够看到同一城市在不同类型的尺子下发生的变化。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字记录，使用静坐和流动政权的记录。这将提供一份政治和其他变化的年表，以便与不同层次的新考古证据进行比较。我们将使用地下技术--增强技术和磁测量技术--来回答我们关于这些城市的物理形态的问题，这反过来将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年代，以便我们可以将它们与文本证据进行尽可能近的比较，这使得这是在草原地区东北亚城市的这种地层细节水平上的第一次研究。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迄今最清晰的图景。这种更尖锐的观点将挑战中华文化在该地区优越的主导形象，将要求我们重新思考东北亚地区的社会政治组织和各种群体之间的互动，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陈述将利用拆除长城的想法，作为接触最广泛受众的一种方式。

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.