Lauren Morris: The dominance of the 'Silk Road' and searching for a non-elite narrative: challenges in writing the economic history of Kushan Central Asia

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Lauren Morris: The dominance of the 'Silk Road' and searching for a non-elite narrative: challenges in writing the economic history of Kushan Central Asia. The Kushan Empire (ca. 50–350 CE), which once stretched from southern Central Asia to northern India, saw significant developments in the region's history but remains poorly integrated into a global perspective on the ancient world. This talk reflects on the agendas and implications of economic history-writing about Kushan Central Asia. Beginning with the 'Kushan middlemen' narrative, the counterpoint of the luxury and prestige goods excavated at Begram are presented as demonstrating exchange directed to the region rather than through it, and thus local elite agency with wide-reaching impacts. Yet, while a useful corrective, the resulting narrative (and arguably much writing on the Silk Road itself) is one disproportionately concerned with a small group of elites – a point that also characterises our current understanding of political history in the Kushan period. This was not always the case: Soviet-era historiography made attempts, with varying success, to engage with non-elite and non-urban perspectives. The agenda of a new research project at Charles University is then presented: to consider non-elite perspectives alongside issues of inequality – even when data are sparse and poor – in order to help flesh out our understanding of broader dynamics of prosperity, decline, political durability, and collapse during this period. By way of conclusion, some preliminary remarks are offered on the first field season of the Czech-Uzbek Archaeological Expedition at the antique-period rural site of Kulal Tepa in southern Uzbekistan.