How Objects Tell Stories

The essays are based on or connected to an analysis of archaeological finds (either underground tomb structures or pit burials) that are contextualized by applying a range of methodologies: visual analysis, textual (ancient and modern) evidence, several types of scientific testing, theoretical reasoning about contact zones and frontiers, material culture analysis, agency theory, hybridity theory (including the process of memorialization); and demonstrate how these methods can be used alternately and collaboratively. Consequently, the volume challenges the more circumscribed views of Eurasia primarily as a place of transmission or as a crossroads or highway along which ideas were carried; Eurasia was also a space of re-invention, experimentation, re-interpretation, and re-purposing. This recognition of the importance of the Eurasian space and broadened perception is indelibly linked to intellectual creativity of Emma C. Bunker.

The volume is divided into two sections, "Objects and Cultural Intersection" and "Objects, Technology and Cross-Cultural Exchange."

INTRODUCTION

Katheryn M. LINDUFF and Karen S. RUBINSON, “How Objects Tell Stories: Essays in Honor of Emma C. Bunker”

I. OBJECTS AND CULTURAL INTERSECTION

Trudy S. KAWAMI, “A Steppe Warrior in Achaemenid Employ? Grave 4.28 at Choga  Mish, Khuzistan, Iran”

Annette L. JULIANO, “Restructuring Reality: Zoomorphs, from Fantastic to Hybrid”

Catrin KOST, “Changed Strategies of Interaction: Exchange Relations on China’s Northern Frontier in Light of the Finds from Xinzhuangtou”

Judith A. LERNER, “All That Glitters…Foreign Jewelry in Chinese Tombs: from Han into Tang”

Katheryn M. LINDUFF, “Guardians of the Brave/Keepers of the Empire: Horses in the Han imaginary”                                                                                  

Jessica RAWSON, “Gold, an Exotic Material in Early China”                                                                     

Karen S. RUBINSON, “The Authority of Horse-Rider Iconography: Imagery as the Power of the Past (The Eurasian Steppe and Yunnan in the late Millennium BCE)”

II: OBJECTS, TECHNOLOGY AND CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGE

CHIOU-PENG TzeHuey, “Early Copper-base Metals in Western Yunnan”

HAN Rubin and WANG Dong-Ning,  “Study of Tin-enriched Ancient Bronzes from the Northern Grassland of China”

Sergey MINIAEV,  “Xiongnu Bronze Metallurgy in the Trans-Baikal Area”

Vincent C. PIGOTT, “The Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), the Seima-Turbino Horizon and a Possible Eastward Transmission of Tin-Bronze Technology in Later Third and Early Second Millennium BCE Inner Asia”

Authors’ Addresses

Color Plates