Gideon Shelach

“...starting from the first (or late second) millennium BCE, people in the area of the Northern Zone thought differently from those living in the Yellow and Yangzi River basins.” This is the time when China and the steppe became alien to one another.

How does he know, or how does he investigate the way people thought of themselves? The ‘archaeology of identity’. New awareness from cultural anthropology has led archaeology (he explains) beyond the study of collective identity, to look show more at individual identities. He looks at the symbols people use, to identify themselves to others, and analyses how these work, what these meant. There was a huge change in symbolism... not so much in lifestyle. A shift of ideology seems to have come ahead, that then hardened, if you like, into the familiar pastoralist/agricultural divide. People made choices, or commitments, and displayed about their persons signs of the way they wished to identify. In the Northern Zone, Gideon Shelach has found, nomadism didn’t begin with economics; his study of human agency uncovers ‘ideological motivations’.

His employment of archaeology, he says, escapes the Chinese records that have written our history unto this day: so that when he turns to those written records, at the end, they do read differently to me, than they had in other books beforehand.

For a more accessible version (in every way) see his essay in 'Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World'. show less