4 septembre 2018
info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Annie Chan et al., « The Andronovo elements of Xinjiang in the Eurasian Bronze Age », HAL SHS (Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société), ID : 10670/1.b9ad77...
This paper assesses the corpus of materials from sites across western and northern Xinjiang attributed to the Andronovo сulture or its influence. As one of the most extensively examined archaeological cultures in recent Central Asian scholarship, the Andronovo's dominion over Xinjiang, the purported eastern periphery, remains yet a perplexing phenomenon. The geography of Xinjiang shares many similarities with its adjacent regions; its mountain steppes and river basins constitute landscapes characteristic of environments in which elements of the Andronovan material culture thrived. To address this eager inquiry into how and in what respects the archaeological record of Xinjiang was connected to the rest of Central Asia in the Bronze Age, this paper reviews a sizable corpus of excavated materials from local field research since the 1980s that however lacks synthesis and cross-examination. It considers the characteristics of these assemblages against the Andronovo's nomenclatural complexity and the history of its discourse in Eurasian archaeology. Specifically, we assess the critical physical and symbolic components of Andronovo culture in funerary, ritual and domestic contexts, and their variability in time and space. We propose a pluralist view of the Bronze Age of Xinjiang and the influence of the Andronovo. Through an integrated view of the evidence in hand, we seek to chart a more informative representation of the spatial reach of the "Andronovo" in Xinjiang and its implications in cultural terms based on substantive and systematic categories of evaluation that address rather than lean on differences in typology.