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Finding Medieval Walls in Mongolia with Gideon Shelach-Lavi - Ep 209
734 Plays1 year ago
We have an interesting interview today with Gideon Shelach-Lavi. He’s part of a team that is researching walls in Mongolia. These walls span a large distance and range of time and some are contemporaneous with the Great Wall. Gideon talks about the tech they used to map and analyze the miles of walls they’ve found and what’s next for them.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/209
Links
- Gideon Shelach-Lavi, surveys, including use of aerial imagery, to find medieval walls on the Mongolian steppes https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/medieval-longwall-construction-on-the-mongolian-steppe-during-the-eleventh-to-thirteenth-centuries-ad/69850626FA671DD5A8454DD63EC31CFD
- “The Wall” project website: https://thewall.huji.ac.il
- Gideon’s Academia.edu profile: https://huji.academia.edu/GideonShelachLavi
Contact
- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 209. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today, we talk to Gideon Shalakhlavi about the technology used on The Wall Project in China and Mongolia. Let's get to it.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everyone. Paul, how's it going? It's going all right. I'm back in the States for a bit right now. I was on Saudi, as you know, working on a variety of projects. The last one, I can't talk about too much again being a CRM project, but we found some very significant archaeology on a site going back into the Middle Ages and perhaps some levels as early as pre-Islamic, which was really, really cool.
00:00:50
Speaker
And then I came back because I was supposed to go out to Lagash, you know, where I've been working the last few years. And the project got bumped a week. And then a week later, it got bumped another week. And a few days ago, it got canceled entirely for the season. So now I'm at home spinning my wheels, hoping to get back in the field because it turns out that, you know, ever since I got back into this field archeology thing, I'd really rather be in the field than at home. How are you
Host Fieldwork Experiences
00:01:14
Speaker
doing, Chris? Last I talked to you, we were chatting on Slack and you were in Greece of all places.
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah. So we just got back about a week ago. We spent a month in Greece. The first part was actually the last week of September on a cruise for my wife's birthday. That's what prompted us to go there was to do this cruise. But even that was cool from an archeological standpoint, because we went up through the Adriatic and
00:01:33
Speaker
went to Dubrovnik and split in Croatia, went to Montenegro, and then down to Corfu, and then back to Athens. And then for the next few weeks, we spent a week on the island of Naxos, which was super cool, the birthplace of Zeus, apparently, in a cave that you're not allowed to go to. And then a week on Crete, and then last week was spent in Athens doing all the
00:01:55
Speaker
the big archeology stuff in Athens, like the Parthenon and the whole Acropolis, I should say, and a bunch of other stuff. So if anybody's interested in hearing more about those, go check out the archeology show, which Rachel and I host. And for the last several weeks, we've been talking about all of our stuff in Greece. And we took a break for, we're recording this on October 30th. We took a break for a Halloween episode about some interesting vampire burials or suspected vampire burials, which actually is a real thing, right? Over in Eastern Europe, especially. So
00:02:25
Speaker
Yeah, people were buried in interesting ways because people actually thought they were vampires and were going to come back alive. So that was an interesting show. But our next one will be our final Greece episode. So if you're interested in any of that, go check it out. So you had a real buttsman's holiday while you were there.
00:02:40
Speaker
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So we haven't done this show for a little while. It's just been, you know, with Paul being gone and us being in Greece, it was just hard to get interviews scheduled and anything else. So we just decided to take a little break. And now I think we're back. We've got a couple interviews today, actually, and hopefully we can keep this going through the winter and, and, and get back on track.
Overview of The Wall Project
00:03:03
Speaker
So.
00:03:03
Speaker
Speaking of which, today we have an interview with Gideon, and I'll have him say that because I probably got it wrong, but he's going to talk to us about a project that, you know, he's working on with the team and we'll hear all about it in a minute, but welcome to the show Gideon. Okay. Thank you very much for having me.
00:03:23
Speaker
Yeah, no problem. So why don't you tell us about this and while you're doing that, if people listening have the ability to look at the show notes, make sure you're not driving or something like that, then take a look at that because there's a paper in here that you may or may not have access to, but there's also a website for this project called the wall. And there's a lot of really great information on there that gives you some of this background that, that getting is going to talk about, but getting and tell us about the wall project, give us a little background of where this is and what it is.
00:03:50
Speaker
Okay, maybe I'll say first of all that as usually in archaeology, this is a joint project. I'm working with people not only from the Hebrew University where I am, but also from Yale University, from the National University of Mongolia. So it's really a big team.
00:04:07
Speaker
So this is first thing that's important to say. Second, it is a project about walls, walls that was built during the medieval period in north East China and in Mongolia. And maybe before I start talking about the project, I would say that for me, it's also a new topic because before
Historical Context and Construction Discussion
00:04:28
Speaker
that, all my career, I worked on prehistoric periods, mostly in China, north China,
00:04:35
Speaker
Bronze Age, the beginning of the Neolithic, was my last project in China. So it's really something new for me, but there is something, if you could say, prehistoric about those walls. So the huge array of walls, something like 4,000 kilometers long, all together, different routes. But not a lot has been written about them, although they were
00:05:01
Speaker
constructed probably or we know that they were constructed sometimes in the medieval period so from the 11th to the 13th century AD but the dynasties that built them did not describe their building or did not there is not a lot of historic information so to understand them is really to try to do things that we do in prehistory to
00:05:28
Speaker
work from the archaeology, from the geography, some history, and try to combine everything together and then understand why did people in the past created such a huge wall? What is the purpose? What is the context? And I think those are questions that are actually relevant for today as well. Why do people build huge border
00:05:52
Speaker
Fences, walls, trenches, all those things. It's not always about war. There are different reasons. And this is the kind of questions we try to address. I have a question for you. I read the article. And also, Chris, we had to put Gideon's academia.edu page on because that's where I got access to the article. Yeah. So everybody riding around their publishers that way. Right.
00:06:22
Speaker
Well, we want to get the information out there, right? But this set of walls that you're discussing, or the one that you're mostly focused on, is distinct from the gray wall, the famous section that we've all seen in a million tourist photos, in what way? Well, it is, I think, part of the same phenomena that in China and part of Mongolia since
00:06:44
Speaker
More than 2,000 years ago, people or dynasties, states are building those huge, long walls, trenches, fortifications, whatever. So this is certainly have this historic background, but
00:07:01
Speaker
this specific system that was built, as I said, from the 11th to the 13th century, sometime there and maybe in different episodes, is different in some ways. First of all, its location. It is not located in what is more or less the division line between pastoralism and agriculture, or between the steppe and the agricultural area. It is, or many parts of it are deep inside the steppe.
00:07:29
Speaker
So you would think, OK, why are they building walls in very remote areas and very sparsely populated areas? So this is one issue. The other issue is that we all know about Chinese dynasties, right? But the two dynasties that were probably responsible for building those walls, either one of them or probably the two of them in different parts, are not
00:07:58
Speaker
you know, Chinese dynasties per se. They were dynasties that controlled parts of China, but the leaders, the elites, the emperors were from non-Chinese origins or non-Han origins. One dynasty is the Liao dynasty, which was founded by the people called Khitan from Corinth in Mongolia.
00:08:22
Speaker
And the other one is the Jin Dynasty that are julchins for Manchuria, from north-east China and southern Siberia. So there are people that are not Chinese. They adopted some Chinese institutes or ideas, but they also kept a lot of their own nomadic culture and tradition. So it's interesting why those people that
00:08:45
Speaker
have so strong inclination or so strong cultural practice of moving, of being nomads, of those kind of things. Why would they build wall to stop movements? Another question actually that came up, you were talking about the relative lack of
00:09:03
Speaker
of historical evidence. Now, Chinese culture at large is very famously a literary culture. Is it something peculiar about this Jin and Liao dynasties that they didn't record as much? And that's why we don't know about these walls, except for archeologically. Or is it something specific about the walls that, you know, that the Jin and Liao cultures, or dynasties rather, did record things, but they just left this as a blind spot? Do you know?
00:09:27
Speaker
They did record. The whole issue of Chinese history is very complex, but yes, we have a history for the Liao, a history for the Jin. In Chinese, those dynasties also use their own language, and maybe this is part of the issue that
00:09:43
Speaker
maybe part of the recordings were in their, you know, Khitan or Jin language, the Georgian language, so it didn't survive. It's not clear, but what is clear that for the Liao, for sure there is no mention even of wall construction. For the Jin, which is a later one, there is some mention, but it's not clear where, what, how big it was, so the information is very, very scarce. And part of what we do if we start, you know,
00:10:12
Speaker
talking about the methodology of what the project do, is partly we try to analyze the historic data as a kind of a big database. Not just reading, but really analyzing, really taking out every bit of information that might be relevant, not only about wall construction, but about border contacts, hunting, climate. Climate is a big issue. Maybe climate has to do with the fact that
00:10:41
Speaker
decided to construct the wall. So we treat the history, you know, largely speaking, not only the official history, but other sources as a kind of big data and try to analyze it in ways that we do today with all the new technologies that are available for data analysis. So this is one part. It's maybe not the main part, but it is one part of our research.
00:11:07
Speaker
Okay. Just wondering here, Paul mentioned the Great Wall, which of course, like
Comparison with the Great Wall
00:11:12
Speaker
he said, we've all seen pictures of that. What is the character and nature of the walls that you guys are specifically studying in this study? Is it similar? I mean, the Great Wall is so striking because of what it is, right? And what it looks like, which is probably why you see it in so many pictures. But are we talking about similar things or, you know, smaller constructions or something like that? What do they look like?
00:11:34
Speaker
Okay, yes and no. It's not like the wall that we know from picture, which is a Ming wall, which is the latest wall from the 16th and 17th century AD, which is very different from everything else. It's big, it's just bricks, it's different. But throughout Chinese history, as I said, from the 5th century BC, dynasties and state constructed walls, those were more modest walls, not so high.
00:12:04
Speaker
and use other techniques like the stamped earth technique which is a very traditional technique of building walls in China and stones and make trenches. Trenches are very important and this wall you can say is part of this tradition. So it's pre-date but all other walls that I mentioned also pre-date the Ming wall. So it's not the same, it's much more modest.
00:12:28
Speaker
But we started our project by analyzing satellite images, air photos, so on. And you can see this line on those images. So it is visible, partly because a lot of it is constructed in an area that was not disturbed by a lot of human activities. So it's not an agricultural area. That's why it's really well preserved. But there is a line. So one question we asked, like you said,
00:12:58
Speaker
Yes, what actually is it? How did it look in the past? And one of the discoveries that we found in the recent expedition, including the one that just ended during this summer, in August, was that maybe there was no real wall. I mean, there was no standing walls.
00:13:21
Speaker
There was a trench that was dug. It is maybe four meters wide. In some places, it's two meters deep. And then they took the earth and piled it on the inside, on the southern side. But they did not construct a standing wall. That's our current hypothesis.
00:13:39
Speaker
On the other hand, throughout or along this wall there are enclosures, there are structures, some of them very big, some of them 100 meter by 100 meter or even larger, and those did have a standing
00:13:54
Speaker
walls and very, very massive walls. So these are combinations of a trench, maybe pile of earth, maybe in some places, low wall and, and those, those camps or those fortresses or those, whatever there was. And this is part of the question we want to understand or address. Okay. Well, with that, we'll take a break and come back on the other side and talk a little bit more about technology and how you guys were using that on this side back in a minute.
00:14:23
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 209 of the architect podcast. And we're talking to Gideon about the wall project. Let's get into the technological aspect of this. So you mentioned remote sensing GIS, some other stuff used on this project. Give us a quick overview of some of the technologies common or otherwise, which let me, let me take an aside there. That's one thing we're talking about leading up to the show is like, Oh, well, we're not using anything really special. We're doing these things, which.
00:14:49
Speaker
Paul and I were like, well, that's awesome that that's kind of common these days, that people are just using these techniques. But we still think that even if it's not something crazy and brand new and something like that, everybody uses a suite of technologies in slightly different ways. And it's that combined usage and the overall usage of things that I find really interesting. And I know Paul does as well, and exactly what you're getting out of that from an analytical standpoint.
00:15:14
Speaker
So before we talk about what you got out of these things, let's talk about what you guys actually used besides, you know, shovels and trowels. What other types of technologies did you use on this project?
00:15:25
Speaker
Okay, so maybe I'll start by saying that this project is funded by the ERC, the European Research Council, which provides us with really nice funding, allow us to do a lot of the things we do. And maybe as a background, I would say that, and we talked about it before the show, this is a project that deals with something huge.
00:15:46
Speaker
4000 kilowatts of walls, fortresses, thousands of fortresses, probably other things. So how do you how do you address those kind of issue, issues that archaeologists today, especially today, we are used to study very tiny, tiny places, you know, test speed, samples, not even a whole site. And suddenly, you have to address such a huge, a huge phenomena. Myself, I did
00:16:13
Speaker
a lot of regional surveys so I had this regional perspective but still it's not something that really we do a lot and then that's why when we started or I started thinking about this project and discuss with other people we thought okay what kind of method we can use to address our basic question which is as I said why people build walls, why they did it, where they did it, what is the
00:16:36
Speaker
ecological context and so on. So the first type of methods we use are methods that are used in order to map this whole
Research Techniques and Field Strategy
00:16:49
Speaker
thing. It's a huge thing. How do you map this? There is no
00:16:52
Speaker
detailed map of those those walls they appear in different atlases but very very good kind of description so really used a lot of remote sensing like they said satellite images corona images i don't know if you're familiar with these
00:17:08
Speaker
on-ground surveys with drones, with air photos, different kinds of radars. Some places the wall is beneath the sand, so we want to locate it. We use different kind of radar apparatuses that are today available also online. Even test-specific location we want to photo to have satellite images, you can do it. And it's not even very expensive today that we didn't have good,
00:17:35
Speaker
good images that we wanted. So this is one part of our analysis. Another part is on ground geophysics and attempts to really, before excavating, trying to see what's below ground, trying to get some ideas because, you know, we have limited time that we are in the field. We go for one month.
00:17:57
Speaker
We stay away, it's expensive, you have to be really careful where you excavate. So we use, and there is a team from the University of Pittsburgh who twice came and tried to map it with magnometers, with a GPR, ground parameter, those kind of things. And I can talk about it more if you want. And then, of course, there are different dating methods. Dating is very important.
00:18:21
Speaker
But you don't always have good samples for carbon-14, which is the usual method. So we also use OSL, which is a way to date geological sample, date soil. So we do that and other techniques like that. We also, in an attempt to understand what
00:18:42
Speaker
What's the structure that are associated with the world where? What were they used for? We have, for example, very big circles, you know, huge circles, like 150 meters in diameter. Why did they construct them? It looked like a kind of an alien kind of...
00:18:59
Speaker
of structures. So one of the doctoral students, you know, a lot of the work is done by doctoral students, one of my doctoral students took a sample, soil samples from very systematically from one of those circles. And we are trying to find out there is some kind of organic residue or evidence for that it was used as a corals for animals or other kind of so. So
00:19:23
Speaker
chemical analysis. The same is true for analyzing poacher, residue analysis to see what people were eating, what was the activity that was done. So we do a lot of chemical analysis for poachers. For others, we just discovered in the last summer in the excavation a basket made of
00:19:43
Speaker
So try to understand, you know, they have, you know, it's a basket. It's not easy to find what it was used for, why it was there. So a lot of those kinds of analysis that I guess are also quite common today, but we have to combine all those lines of evidence. And then, as you mentioned, you know, understanding the geographical context.
00:20:05
Speaker
why this is very important for walls, you know, why they selected to build the wall to dig the trench in this place and not another. So different types of geographical analysis, GIS, and I can talk more about those kind of analysis.
00:20:23
Speaker
I have a good question for you then. Since you brought up radiocarbon dating, how confident are you of the contemporaneity of the different things you're analyzing here, especially between that wall or the segments of the wall and the large rectangular buildings and these very large circular enclosures?
00:20:40
Speaker
For most of them, I'm quite confident that they are from the same time. You can see that there is a systematic effort. You can see that all the enclosure, for example, is the northern line that we studied most. And this is the article you referred to. You have every 30 kilometers or 20, 30 kilometers. You have a cluster of structures. The structures
00:21:02
Speaker
all look more or less the same. You can see that there is a system here and it's consistent. So I think that the association between the wall and the structure or most of the structure, there are some that maybe are not, but most of them is not a big problem. The problem of dating is
00:21:18
Speaker
that when you're talking about historic periods, it's not like for history that 100 years here and there will not affect your analysis. Here, every 50 years can really matter, can really make a difference. So how do you come up with dates that are so accurate that they are on the verge of the error range?
00:21:42
Speaker
of the system and that's why you have to think about it very carefully. What you date and how you understand the dating that you get.
00:21:52
Speaker
From a mapping standpoint, you mentioned in the beginning that the mapping, these things weren't very well mapped altogether, right? So coming up with a comprehensive map of all the walls or as much as you can would be a good idea. Where are you guys at in this process? I'm curious, how many field seasons have you done? How many more do you think you have to go as far as getting this whole project mapped? Because it sounds like a massive effort.
00:22:14
Speaker
Yes. So, so we are not planning on visiting all the locations. Most of the mapping is done. We started with the existing data. So we started with a big atlases, but you know, maps of one by, by, by 2000 kilometers or something that's very, very large scale. And then try to find those lines on the existing satellite images, which is not always easy because here again, you can have.
00:22:40
Speaker
arrows in the range of 100 kilometers. So, you know, our graduate students were sitting on those images and trying to locate and follow the different lines and finding new lines and all of this. And this effort is almost finished. We are now working on one segment that is in the Gobi Desert, so further to the west and south of what we worked until today. And we are not sure that this segment is actually
00:23:07
Speaker
part of the world that we are studying or something else. So we are mapping it and coming May, we will visit parts of it and try to understand if it's actually connected or not connected to the system we are studying. So that's how we work. We do the mapping. We use all the different sources and try to be as accurate as we can, mapping not only the line of the wall and trench, but also the structure that are
00:23:35
Speaker
are associated with it and then
00:23:38
Speaker
select some points and visit them and study them, do a survey, do test excavations, and then we go to the next phase and do another more maybe detailed excavations and selected sites. So it's a kind of three-stage system of field work. I imagine we will do it for the coming three years. That's more or less a budget that I have now, and then we'll see how much we can get.
00:24:06
Speaker
I'm curious, looking at the map, we're talking north of Beijing and these wall segments cross Mongolia, part of Russia and China. Are you able to cross those borders in the study or is all your work being focused in Mongolia, the actual physical on the groundwork?
00:24:22
Speaker
Yes, so far we only did fieldwork in Mongolia. You know, my previous work, my previous experience is mostly in China, so I have very good connections in China and I hope we go back and study some of the segments or most of the segments actually in China and they are very interesting.
00:24:39
Speaker
Some of them are quite different from what we studied so far, so I do hope to do some work in China in cooperation, of course, with a Chinese archaeologist, and I already started negotiating this. The part, the small part in Russia, I don't think I will go there.
00:24:57
Speaker
But aside from that, it's China and Mongolia, and we do work in both places. But again, you cannot do everything. You have to develop a strategy, and this is part of the idea of how to work on such big phenomena, a strategy how to sample, how to map, how to get the information you need from the limited amount of time you have. And it's always limited.
00:25:24
Speaker
Right. Okay. Well, our time is limited here too. So let's take a break and then we'll wrap up this discussion on the other side back in a minute.
00:25:33
Speaker
Welcome back for the final segment of the Architect podcast, episode 209 here with Gideon talking about the wall project in, well, China, Mongolia. And I had a question, you mentioned OSL dating and I know people have used that when you like, you know, turn over a rock or something like that. That's been sitting for hundreds, if not thousands of years and, and hasn't moved since then you can do some dating techniques based on that, which made me think.
00:25:58
Speaker
you know, these walls are, I mean, prominent, they're hard to miss, right? So people living after wall construction, even a hundred years, couple hundred years later, or anytime later, is there any evidence that these, like some of the construction of the walls were repurposed or maybe added to, and then, you know, can you see that in the construction through some of your excavations or just other analysis, you know, trying to understand the different phases of building or, or deconstruction, you know what I mean?
00:26:24
Speaker
Yes, so we do have two very interesting examples so far of people using the, not the wall, but the enclosure, the structures as kind of a burial ground. So this is a prominent feature in the landscape. This is a very flat landscape. You see it from far away and they would
00:26:43
Speaker
digging a grave into those structures that we have now actually we're just in the process of finishing a paper on one of those graves which is not a big grave but it has a lot of findings including fabric, silk, wood, organic materials, of course bronze, gold,
00:27:01
Speaker
everything you want glass so it's really interesting kind of a microcosmos you can from one one brave and make different analyses seeing where those artifacts are coming from but yes so people were were reacting to those things because they are very prominent in the landscape and this is a landscape where you don't have a lot of of those kind of things you know not a lot of ancient constructions
00:27:26
Speaker
So yes, but still, I think OSL is useful. The problem with OSL is it's not that accurate or the error range are very big for the kind of question we're asking. Still, it is a way to date the wall, the trenches, the ditches, when they were filled and so on. And it gave us some indication. And also, I didn't talk about the ecological aspect of this project, but you also have an ecological
00:27:56
Speaker
We want to understand if there was some ecological conditions that are part of the reason why people constructed those walls so we can get a lot of evidence from the earth. We take from the ditches and date them and see differences, changes in the pollen, changes in the
00:28:13
Speaker
things that were accumulated in the ditch, and also we do some coring in lakes, nearby lakes, to understand the specific period of construction. So this is another whole issue that we didn't discuss. Yeah, absolutely. You know, just to point out, because I'm sure our audience knows this, but even if the OSL dating has got some wide error bars on it,
00:28:36
Speaker
In conjunction with other things, it's the whole suite of things that you're talking about here, you know, that everything adds a little bit of a piece to the puzzle. You know what I mean? So if that was the only dating method you were using, we'd have some questions, but it's not. And it's just one piece of the big puzzle. And I love that. Right. So even though you know that, Hey, you know, maybe this isn't going to be very accurate, but it's going to be something we do because it'll still tell us some information. Right.
00:29:01
Speaker
And also, of course, of course you always, and this is something that I think people understand now, you cannot rely on one date, even if it's a more tactical date. You have to take a lot of dates, you have to do statistics, you have to see, you know, what, where is the problems. So taking many dates and, and factoring in other factors we have.
00:29:18
Speaker
Coins, for example, we have a shirt that sometimes we can date, especially porcelain, Chinese porcelain, can be quite accurately dated by the patrons. So all of it together, you're correct. It can give us maybe more accurate and complete picture of what's going on.
00:29:37
Speaker
So maybe we should pivot now because you've told us a lot about how you're doing your work and where you're doing your work and what you're studying. And what have you learned so far? What have you revealed in terms of where and why and how these walls were constructed?
00:29:53
Speaker
Yes, so one of the main issues is actually why and is it, or maybe I'll frame it differently, is this war all about war? Was it a kind of, you know, a line of defense against Mongolian invasions or invasion from the north or did it meant to do other things? And one way to think about it is
00:30:18
Speaker
to think about idealized way of how people construct border defense. So for example, if you think about border defense, you think about the wall that is meant to be in a position where it's difficult to cross it. Also, the fortresses that accompanied it should be on higher ground, looking over the fence, places where it's easy to defend, places where you can see the enemy coming from far away, right?
00:30:46
Speaker
So those kind of assumptions, and we try to check it systematically, not only looking at one example, but really look at, for example, that's what we did for the Northern line that we studied. Where are those enclosure positions?
00:31:01
Speaker
position on higher points. Are there, you know, the ideal point for seeing enemy coming? And the surprising maybe result was that no, they are in the most unorthodox or not unrelated to defense location, very low places.
00:31:19
Speaker
near the streams. It's places where you cannot seize the wall very well. The last point where we worked actually this year, which is not in the northern line, but in one of the more southern lines, we excavated in one structure like this. And the structure is like maybe 300 meters away from the wall, but you cannot see the wall from the structure because it is on a slope that is, you know,
00:31:44
Speaker
away from the wall and there is a kind of small hill between them. So this is not a place where people will position their defensive fortresses and so on. And that makes us try to think of different types of explanation. And one explanation is of course a movement.
00:32:02
Speaker
Where do people move in the landscape? Not armies. Armies, of course, we move everywhere, and we try to surprise you, and we try to come in unexpected operation. But people think about herders, pastoral nomadic people. Where would they move? And we think that if we analyze the movement, movement patterns, and you can do those things with GIS, analyze the movement patterns of people, those structures are located where people would cross
00:32:32
Speaker
cross the line, cross the ditch line, or cross the wall line. So maybe the whole system is more about controlling the movement of people in, but also maybe out. A lot of those dynasties did not want their people to go out, to join, let's say, the nomadic or the more nomadic people outside of the wall. So controlling, maybe texting. Things like that become more important when you start to look at the big patrons.
Purpose of the Walls
00:33:02
Speaker
Where is the war located? Where are the structures located? How they are related to roads, even corn roads, because the landscape and the movement, the type of movement didn't change much. People are still riding horses in those places. So you can follow those things, but I think as long as you do it on a large scale, in a systematic way, and so on.
00:33:27
Speaker
Another method we use with GIS is to look at a view shed analysis. So what would you see from each structure? Where are you looking? What is the landscape you can view? And again,
00:33:42
Speaker
It's not a pattern that is very useful for defending borderline, but maybe more for controlling movement, maybe associating with water sources, with wells, with springs, and so on, so trying to think about those issues.
00:34:00
Speaker
of scope bring more questions. So, okay, what did they people do with people that lived in those structures? How did they survive? Were they pastoralists or were they trying to do agriculture? And so those kinds of new questions that you can address with other types of methods.
00:34:17
Speaker
That's interesting. So correct me if I've misinterpreted this, but it sounds like you're arguing that it's not for defensive purposes where you'd stop somebody from coming through. It's for regulatory purposes where you're controlling how many and at what times and how quickly these nomadic populations go one way or the other.
00:34:34
Speaker
I don't want to sound too deterministic or too strong. Maybe part of it was in order at least to control against invasions and so on. But it seems to me that most of it was trying to control and know who is coming, who is moving around.
00:34:56
Speaker
stop but not stop armies. It's not a wall, you know, even if you think about the wall as a trench, let's say four meter wide and two meter deep and some additional wall or earth file. This is not something that, you know, the Jingi's Han and his army would not cross very quickly.
00:35:15
Speaker
So it would not stop there. But if you want to stop movement, this is where climate comes to the picture. It is a period probably with a lot of climatic anomalies, especially very cold season, cold spells.
00:35:34
Speaker
So maybe there was a push for people to move from the north southward and the dynasty did not want all those refugees, let's say, entering, or at least wanted to control them and maybe want to make some profit out of those people coming with their herds. And so I think we have to think about it in this way. And of course, again, it's very relevant to think that we see today in the world, you know, people, a lot of their walls, you know, built, you know,
00:35:59
Speaker
Trump wall and so on are not against armies. You know, Mexican army would not invade the US, I think, but it is meant to control the movement of people. And I think this is mainly what we see in the world system, but we are still, you know, studying. So it's not a conclusive answer, I would say.
00:36:21
Speaker
Right. You know, question I was thinking about, cause the, the first thing I think of with walls, especially of this type, not necessarily like the gray wall, the big fortifications, but you know, the, the smaller ones, like the ones that we're talking about here, you know, I've done a lot of work in Nevada in the United States and we've done a lot of reading on other places in the, in the world too. And a lot of times walls like that are used for property lines, you know, just, just marking some of the edge of somebody's territory or something like that. I guess even farmers or something, you know, or not really farmers, but
00:36:51
Speaker
people with herds and things like that and just marking lines. Is there any cultural historical evidence that they would have done that at these timeframes? I don't think so. You know, first of all, those are again, although there's the step area, you don't see any structures, you know, prehistoric prehistoric structure. There are a few like burials, other type of this type of monuments, but you don't see buildings, you don't see many, there are some cities, but very few. So, so I
00:37:21
Speaker
I don't think this is a property line per se, but it is a state level, a dynasty level kind of project. So it is not on the local level. It is planned from above somewhere and it's still a lot of work to do those kind of things and to bring all those people to the step, dip into the step, feed them and so on. So it's a lot of work.
00:37:48
Speaker
even if it's a lot of work, doesn't mean that it's only about war. And one interesting thing that you mentioned, you know, examples from around the world, when I started doing this project and started reading about wars, and especially about trenches, I found out that there are a lot of other types of examples, not only in China, Mongolia, and very famous wars, but also in Central Asia, you know, in Iran, Sasanian wars, there are in Britain,
00:38:16
Speaker
you know, the offer diacs, all those kinds of things, not only the Roman limits, which is also, you know, a question whether it was used only for war or also for those kinds of things that I was talking about. So looking at the global perspective is also something very interesting for me. And as I said, also, you know, comparing to modern examples, maybe we can get some ideas and check them on the archaeological record. Indeed.
00:38:45
Speaker
All
Future Plans for The Wall Project
00:38:46
Speaker
right. Well, we are just about out of time here. So Gideon, I'm just wondering what's next for you guys on this project. Where are you going from here?
00:38:53
Speaker
So as I said, we will work on a line in the Gobi Desert, south of where we worked, and try to understand if it is connected or not. We want to go back to some of the places we already visited and excavate more detail, especially inside the structure and try to understand better how they were used and so on. As I said, I want to go to China and work on some of the lines there with the Chinese colleagues.
00:39:22
Speaker
And my idea for the next project is actually to look at the cities that exist on the step. There are cities in the step and some of them may be connected to this line. So this is really maybe the next project I was thinking about.
00:39:38
Speaker
Okay. Fascinating. Well, we'll have to have you back on later on then when you've got more, uh, more to say about this. So, all right. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And like I said, anytime you guys want to come back on, please do so. And we've got another interview Paul and I are doing right after this. So a lot of good stuff coming up for the architect podcast for our audience. So stick around and, and stay with us for the rest of the winter and fall anyway. So thanks a lot.
00:40:05
Speaker
See you guys next time. Thank you, Gideon. That was very fascinating. Thank you very much.
00:40:16
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:40:41
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.