Friends of ASOR present this upcoming webinar of the 2024-2025 season on April 30, 2025, at 2:00 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Kate Franklin. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.

To imagine the medieval Silk Road is to conjure up images of exotic commerce: camel caravans crossing wind-swept dunes, bustling city bazaars, silks and spices spilling from saddlebags. If these images loom large in modern imaginations of the Silk Road, how did people actually living in the Middle Ages think about long distance trade and travel? Drawing on textual, architectural and archaeological evidence, this talk explores the social lives of people living not in the city centers of medieval commerce, but in the places in-between, along the road. Specifically, the talk invites us to spend some time along the roadside with medieval people in the Armenian highlands, where special-built caravan inns housed travelers heading for the Mediterranean, to China, to the Middle East, and north into the steppe, and where people had their own imaginaries of the wider medieval world. Kate Franklin will share aspects of her work in the Republic of Armenia which show how global cultures emerge hand-in-hand with local worlds.

Kate Franklin is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London. Kate is a landscape archaeologist and historian focused on the intersections of local and large-scale social worlds in the medieval landscapes of what is now the Republic of Armenia, where she has been co-PI of the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey for nearly a decade. Kate’s most recent book, Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages (Routledge 2023, co-authored with Michael Bintley) explores the cultural history of nature in the medieval period.

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