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

东北亚的历史鲜为人知，误解甚多。今天，这个地区是中国、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的区域。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。植根于草原的政权，如辽朝（907-1125）及其家族，经常出现在电影、电视剧和汽车广告中（www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWWKt9alpE4）。中国最近的东北工程利用历史证据声称，这里的政权依赖并源自“中国文明”。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，而这个地区的相互作用可以追溯到几千年前。东北亚人，无论是“农民”还是“游牧民族”，从已知最早的时代起就做着许多相同的事情，其中之一就是利用城市。我们的记录表明，城市是使中国文明优于流动的游牧社会的原因之一，但草原上也有城市：或大或小，并不总是有城墙，和中国帝国一样古老。如果中国和游牧政权都使用城市，那么它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？城市是由什么组成的，又是如何组织的？谁住在哪里，他们做什么？城市的存在就意味着国家的存在吗？墙是用来干什么的？这个项目将通过在一个长期的历史背景下设置新的物证来回答这些问题。历史传达了统治精英的观点，但生活在城市里的全社会阶层的人，真实的故事发生在底层。通过将文本和考古方法更紧密地结合起来，我们将提供新的证据，揭示内蒙古赤峰周围三个边境城市以前未见过的日常生活模式，这些城市在大约200年至1200年间被“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统治下，同一城市中不断变化的活动。我们将收集我们感兴趣时期赤峰地区及其城市的稀疏文本记录，并与定居和流动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——螺旋钻和磁力计——来回答我们关于这些城市物理形态的问题，这些问题反过来将为我们提供历史问题的证据，如经济实践、权力关系、工业和工作、宗教和身份表达。我们将使用碳-14测试来确定我们发现的地层的年代，这样我们就可以尽可能地将它们与文本证据进行比较，使这成为东北亚城市在草原位置的这种层次的地层细节的第一次研究。我们的证据将为中国心脏地带以外城市中心的日常生活提供迄今为止最清晰的画面。这种更尖锐的观点将挑战中国文化在该地区的主导形象，将要求我们重新思考东北亚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展示将会把拆除长城的想法作为一种接触尽可能广泛的观众的方式。

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.