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Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre-Modern World
Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre-Modern World reveals the significance and interconnectedness of early civilizations’ pathways. This international collection of readings providing a description and comparative analysis of several sophisticated systems of transport and communication across pre-modern cultures.
- GenresHistory
312 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
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August 23, 2020
Introduction
Pre-modern societies, worldwide, developed systems of overland (and in some cases riverine and maritime) transport and communication. Yet we would argue that there has been not only a slowness to enumerate and describe the innumerable “highways” of these societies and their functioning, but even more a failure to evaluate them, and their social, cultural, and even religious importance, in any comparative fashion.
The volume’s vital comparative dimension enables it to cohere to a remarkable degree, and should encourage inter-disciplinary research aimed at developing the further potential of such approaches. Even more fundamentally, we hope that the volume will inspire inquiry into the highways of major pre-modern states where these have yet to be studied
Two instances (Maya sacbeob causeway roads and Inca Highways) road construction was clearly only part of a more extensive remodeling of the landscape that served either to impress upon the population the proud grip imposed by a dominant power (Julien) or to unite kin groups and facilitate social integration (Shaw).
At the other extreme, despite the traffic passing between principal settlements, there might even be no road visible at all to the untrained eye – the most obvious cases, in this context, being the Egyptian deserts (the context of Jennifer GatesFoster’s chapter) and the Sahara (discussed by Pekka Masonen), a desert conceived of by Arabic geographers and others as an ocean, with its oases as islands, and camels (only used widely after the Arab conquest) as ships for the perilous twomonth crossing.
A landscape was often more suitably penetrated and traversed by multiple paths rather than by highways. Silk Road, Jason Neelis underlines the need for travelers to vary their routes in the face of “constant shifts in the high mountain terrain caused by the movements of glaciers, avalanches caused by earthquakes, rivers, and streams made difficult to cross by swollen snowmelt in the late summer, and extremely vertical topography”
The modern western assumption that a road of any importance would be a statesponsored, rather than a private, initiative is undercut. Undercut, too, by this volume is the further modern assumption that a road will necessarily be constructed to accommodate wheeled traffic. On the contrary, even cultures aware of the wheel might use it little or not at all on their roads. As a result, the gradients on Inca highways could be far steeper than any to be found on a Roman road
Highways in China during the Classical Era, official checkpoints regulated travelers so as (in Nylan’s words) “to control the flow of people, things, and ideas as much as possible, lest too much commerce and too much movement disrupt subject populations engaged in sedentary agriculture, the basis of stable rule within civil society” (p. 42)
Where the presence of a system is not in doubt, the modern mind still may too readily take for granted a degree of conscious planning and control. The close insight offered by Pierre Briant into the network of Persian “Royal Roads” – with relay stations and royal warehouses sited along them at regular intervals for the benefit of authorized travelers – lends full conviction to his claim that “the road system itself formed an essential feature for military strategy and for the organization of territories” (p. 196).
There can be no doubt that the far-flung Roman road system did serve as an active force for social, economic and cultural change. The chapters by Neelis and Masonen offer important reminders that routes linking distinctly different cultures have the potential to influence the spheres at both ends, not merely at one.
In crossing landscapes, the experience of traversing an age-old route could clearly inspire travelers to articulate their sense of relationship both with the predecessors in whose footsteps they were following, and with the gods.
One aim of the comparative conferences in early cultures at Brown that give birth to volumes such as this is to stimulate new insights into similarities and differences among civilizations not regularly considered together.
Snead’s sharp review of scholarly misreading of poorly archaeologically documented Pueblo trails and Chaco roads in the American Southwest advocates an approach to connectivity that turns the focus away from points and lines toward archaeologies of movement and emplacement
Maas and Ruths demonstrate in their testcase analysis of the road system of the later Roman empire, the possibility exists of detecting through patterns of connectivity “clusters” of economic, social, or political significance that broadly correspond to the regional divisions (dioceses) of provincial organization at the dawn of late antiquity.
the well-maintained arteries and trunk roads of the western Roman empire during the first three centuries CE accomplished both: they brought provincial towns into the imperial community by stimulating local economic and cultural growth and thus helped them to articulate their local identities against the backdrop of a global Roman culture.
Overland Shortcuts for the Transmission of Buddhism
More than 50,000 petroglyphs and 5,000 inscriptions demarcate a network of interconnected passageways that directly connected the Northern Route of South Asia with branches of the Silk Routes in eastern Central Asia.
ancient travelers could choose their itineraries based on environmental, economic, political, and religious considerations. Marc Bloch made a similar observation about travel in medieval Europe: “from the beginning of his journey to the end, the traveler had almost always the choice of several itineraries, of which none was absolutely obligatory” (1961, 1.64). Although topographical features constrained the choice of routes, the vast collection of graffiti and petroglyphs demonstrate significant mobility across the high mountain terrain [...] they served as alternative pathways for
trans-Asian movement across permeable geographical and cultural boundaries.
To account for this chronological discrepancy between early manifestations of Buddhism in China during the first two centuries and the late appearance of Buddhist institutions in the Tarim Basin, Zürcher proposed that Xinjiang remained a “transit zone” (1999, 13) until economic conditions allowed residential monasteries to flourish after the third century. Zürcher juxtaposed the model of diffusion by contact expansion to an alternative theory of “long-distance transmission” (1990, 182) in order to clarify early patterns in the cross-cultural movement of Buddhism to China
Literary hagiographies, graffiti inscriptions, and images drawn on rocks attest to the use of networks of ancient paths that connected South Asia, Central Asia, and China
Monks and merchants followed flexible itineraries that changed according to shifting economic, political, and environmental conditions.
The Power of Highway Networks during China’s Classical Era (323 BCE–316 CE): Regulations, Metaphors, Rituals, and Deities
Six aspects of roads during the early empires command attention: (1) the basic structure of the road network itself, as revealed in newly excavated documents and sites; (2) the regulations for road-building, maintenance, and use; (3) the hierarchical road network as a key instantiation of political power; (4) the various metaphorical constructions placed on “paths” and “the Way” in political and moral treatises, with talk of infrastructure generally leading to discussions of communication and communicativeness vs. rebellion, prestige vs. exploitation and downfall, and longterm investment vs. short-term profit; (5) the consequent perception of roads as forces for good or ill in society; and (6) the many shrines erected to road builders (also to bridge- and canal-builders, given that roads and waterways are conflated in the Han sources) and the sacrifices offered to road gods.
as the number of early archaeological sites keeps accelerating at a breakneck pace, with some 30, 000 Han sites discovered in the years 1949–95 and an additional 60, 000 sites since the mid-1990s, we should expect breakthroughs in research on road networks and their associations. At present, sweeping generalizations about the rapidly changing field of early China studies frequently mask fragile hypotheses likely to be overturned by the next major archaeological find
the two most important factors making for dynastic strength were identified as population growth and improvements in transport facilities. To conquer and to civilize a vast area required road-building on an unprecedented scale. Some historians, early and modern, have believed that the main factor in the pre-dynastic Qin state’s eventual success over six rival kingdoms was the set of roads it laid out in Shu (modern Sichuan) during the late fourth century BCE, which allowed the efficient exploitation of the area’s minerals and foodstuffs by the Qin court at Xianyang hundreds of miles away.
the stepped hierarchy of the classical-era roadways reflected the supposedly “natural” hierarchies prevailing in human society, with the Middle Path of the widest and most level “highways".
Though generally perceived as natural and organic systems, the roads, like the waterways, presumably required constant human intervention and adjustment to insure their functioning. Hence the imposition of an unambiguous hierarchy of main thoroughfares to secondary paths, as well as routine checks on the number and quality of contacts between units.
the dynasty hoped to control the flow of people, things, and ideas as much as possible, lest too much commerce and too much movement disrupt subject populations engaged in sedentary agriculture, the basis of stable rule within civil society.
Obliterated Itineraries: Pueblo Trails, Chaco Roads, and Archaeological Knowledge
we have imposed a dichotomy on the data, distinguishing between “roads” on the one hand and paths, pathways, tracks, and trails on the other. To this way of thinking, roads reflect intentionality. Someone had them built – with all the agency the term entails – so that they are “meaningful” features in their own right. Paths, in contrast, are seen as a passive byproduct of some more “natural” activity that is purposeful only in the most functional sense.
Trails and paths are seen as reflections of less complex societies, in which the overt forms of action embodied by roads are seen to be unlikely. Roads portray order, rule, and control, symbolizing status, authority and their entangled associations: all characteristics thought relevant only for cases of “complexity".
Sarah Harrison (2003) takes on the case of the famous Icknield Way, an apparently ancient route running across southern England. “Perhaps the most striking thing about the idea of a continuous, prehistoric, Icknield Way,” she writes, “is that the main concepts underpinning it are no longer fully accepted by archaeologists, but are rooted in outmoded concepts of prehistoric settlement, economy and society” (Harrison 2003, 5).
Here I am interested in exploring one particular truism – that roads uniquely “fix” space, and thus impose order on movement. The apparent permanence of roads is worth examining in greater detail because it pertains to the idea that all other sorts of routes are wandering and ephemeral. Numerous references to the allegedly expedient and transitory nature of paths and trails can be found in the archaeological literature on the subject (e.g., Crawford 1960, 75).
A review of the evidence indicates that what might be described as emplacement – the physical inscription of movement into the landscape – is a widely distributed phenomenon associated with human travel in many times and circumstances. It is also clearly not a feature of roads alone but is widely associated with paths and trails as well.
It is evident that emplaced trails channeled human movement through landscapes for lengthy periods of time, fixing space in a way analogous to that usually argued for roads. At a minimum this implies that the role of construction and formality in landscapes of movement is less straightforward than is often acknowledged. Payson Sheets (2009) has recently suggested that any symbolism associated with fixed movement clearly has its origins in the experience of travel along trails and paths rather than as new ideas imposed by roads. His own case study, drawn from Costa Rica, suggests that the construction of sunken roads and entryways in Central American chiefdoms was a strategy designed to mimic the entrenched pathways of earlier eras.
formality in landscapes of movement is what you make of it, since landmarks produced by action and landmarks produced by intention are intrinsically related. In other words, whether a road was built by a particular leader or whether it was produced by generations of people walking the route, it might ultimately be perceived in the same way.
Roads, paths, and trails imply not simply communication but connection, which is not the same thing. It may seem simplistic to say that the essential function of these features is to connect, but how they establish such connections makes them particularly complex and interesting. Instead of discussing what paths, trails, and roads did, we must examine what they were – places with particular characteristics associated with movement. And movement is not a “neutral” or value-free process. It engages links and boundaries, opportunities and barriers, belonging and exclusion.
Where roads are distinct – as particular landscapes of movement – lies not in the fact that they fix movement in place but that they manipulate the symbolism of movement to prioritize particular relationships
It is true that roads and trails as phenomena cannot be entirely stripped of functional and sociopolitical corollaries. Wheeled vehicles have certain requirements, as do armies on the march, and the labor mobilization associated with societies organized at larger scales is, cross-culturally, an essential component of road construction. But these characteristics are a matter of context and degree, rather than a fundamental element of the concept.
Road building thus reconfigures the signature of travel in its various manifestations in order to inscribe particular relationships into the landscape. Viewing roads, paths and trails as landmarks of connection, whether organic or materialized (in the sense of De Marrais et al. 1996; Snead 2009), thus allows archaeologists to see them differently and perhaps to understand them in new ways.
Roads, paths and trails are an element of the archaeological record that can truly be treated in a comparative fashion. People do walk from A to B, and did so in the Paleolithic as well as today. the ubiquity of movement provides a stage on which various elements of human drama are played out.
Pre-modern societies, worldwide, developed systems of overland (and in some cases riverine and maritime) transport and communication. Yet we would argue that there has been not only a slowness to enumerate and describe the innumerable “highways” of these societies and their functioning, but even more a failure to evaluate them, and their social, cultural, and even religious importance, in any comparative fashion.
The volume’s vital comparative dimension enables it to cohere to a remarkable degree, and should encourage inter-disciplinary research aimed at developing the further potential of such approaches. Even more fundamentally, we hope that the volume will inspire inquiry into the highways of major pre-modern states where these have yet to be studied
Two instances (Maya sacbeob causeway roads and Inca Highways) road construction was clearly only part of a more extensive remodeling of the landscape that served either to impress upon the population the proud grip imposed by a dominant power (Julien) or to unite kin groups and facilitate social integration (Shaw).
At the other extreme, despite the traffic passing between principal settlements, there might even be no road visible at all to the untrained eye – the most obvious cases, in this context, being the Egyptian deserts (the context of Jennifer GatesFoster’s chapter) and the Sahara (discussed by Pekka Masonen), a desert conceived of by Arabic geographers and others as an ocean, with its oases as islands, and camels (only used widely after the Arab conquest) as ships for the perilous twomonth crossing.
A landscape was often more suitably penetrated and traversed by multiple paths rather than by highways. Silk Road, Jason Neelis underlines the need for travelers to vary their routes in the face of “constant shifts in the high mountain terrain caused by the movements of glaciers, avalanches caused by earthquakes, rivers, and streams made difficult to cross by swollen snowmelt in the late summer, and extremely vertical topography”
The modern western assumption that a road of any importance would be a statesponsored, rather than a private, initiative is undercut. Undercut, too, by this volume is the further modern assumption that a road will necessarily be constructed to accommodate wheeled traffic. On the contrary, even cultures aware of the wheel might use it little or not at all on their roads. As a result, the gradients on Inca highways could be far steeper than any to be found on a Roman road
Highways in China during the Classical Era, official checkpoints regulated travelers so as (in Nylan’s words) “to control the flow of people, things, and ideas as much as possible, lest too much commerce and too much movement disrupt subject populations engaged in sedentary agriculture, the basis of stable rule within civil society” (p. 42)
Where the presence of a system is not in doubt, the modern mind still may too readily take for granted a degree of conscious planning and control. The close insight offered by Pierre Briant into the network of Persian “Royal Roads” – with relay stations and royal warehouses sited along them at regular intervals for the benefit of authorized travelers – lends full conviction to his claim that “the road system itself formed an essential feature for military strategy and for the organization of territories” (p. 196).
There can be no doubt that the far-flung Roman road system did serve as an active force for social, economic and cultural change. The chapters by Neelis and Masonen offer important reminders that routes linking distinctly different cultures have the potential to influence the spheres at both ends, not merely at one.
In crossing landscapes, the experience of traversing an age-old route could clearly inspire travelers to articulate their sense of relationship both with the predecessors in whose footsteps they were following, and with the gods.
One aim of the comparative conferences in early cultures at Brown that give birth to volumes such as this is to stimulate new insights into similarities and differences among civilizations not regularly considered together.
Snead’s sharp review of scholarly misreading of poorly archaeologically documented Pueblo trails and Chaco roads in the American Southwest advocates an approach to connectivity that turns the focus away from points and lines toward archaeologies of movement and emplacement
Maas and Ruths demonstrate in their testcase analysis of the road system of the later Roman empire, the possibility exists of detecting through patterns of connectivity “clusters” of economic, social, or political significance that broadly correspond to the regional divisions (dioceses) of provincial organization at the dawn of late antiquity.
the well-maintained arteries and trunk roads of the western Roman empire during the first three centuries CE accomplished both: they brought provincial towns into the imperial community by stimulating local economic and cultural growth and thus helped them to articulate their local identities against the backdrop of a global Roman culture.
Overland Shortcuts for the Transmission of Buddhism
More than 50,000 petroglyphs and 5,000 inscriptions demarcate a network of interconnected passageways that directly connected the Northern Route of South Asia with branches of the Silk Routes in eastern Central Asia.
ancient travelers could choose their itineraries based on environmental, economic, political, and religious considerations. Marc Bloch made a similar observation about travel in medieval Europe: “from the beginning of his journey to the end, the traveler had almost always the choice of several itineraries, of which none was absolutely obligatory” (1961, 1.64). Although topographical features constrained the choice of routes, the vast collection of graffiti and petroglyphs demonstrate significant mobility across the high mountain terrain [...] they served as alternative pathways for
trans-Asian movement across permeable geographical and cultural boundaries.
To account for this chronological discrepancy between early manifestations of Buddhism in China during the first two centuries and the late appearance of Buddhist institutions in the Tarim Basin, Zürcher proposed that Xinjiang remained a “transit zone” (1999, 13) until economic conditions allowed residential monasteries to flourish after the third century. Zürcher juxtaposed the model of diffusion by contact expansion to an alternative theory of “long-distance transmission” (1990, 182) in order to clarify early patterns in the cross-cultural movement of Buddhism to China
Literary hagiographies, graffiti inscriptions, and images drawn on rocks attest to the use of networks of ancient paths that connected South Asia, Central Asia, and China
Monks and merchants followed flexible itineraries that changed according to shifting economic, political, and environmental conditions.
The Power of Highway Networks during China’s Classical Era (323 BCE–316 CE): Regulations, Metaphors, Rituals, and Deities
Six aspects of roads during the early empires command attention: (1) the basic structure of the road network itself, as revealed in newly excavated documents and sites; (2) the regulations for road-building, maintenance, and use; (3) the hierarchical road network as a key instantiation of political power; (4) the various metaphorical constructions placed on “paths” and “the Way” in political and moral treatises, with talk of infrastructure generally leading to discussions of communication and communicativeness vs. rebellion, prestige vs. exploitation and downfall, and longterm investment vs. short-term profit; (5) the consequent perception of roads as forces for good or ill in society; and (6) the many shrines erected to road builders (also to bridge- and canal-builders, given that roads and waterways are conflated in the Han sources) and the sacrifices offered to road gods.
as the number of early archaeological sites keeps accelerating at a breakneck pace, with some 30, 000 Han sites discovered in the years 1949–95 and an additional 60, 000 sites since the mid-1990s, we should expect breakthroughs in research on road networks and their associations. At present, sweeping generalizations about the rapidly changing field of early China studies frequently mask fragile hypotheses likely to be overturned by the next major archaeological find
the two most important factors making for dynastic strength were identified as population growth and improvements in transport facilities. To conquer and to civilize a vast area required road-building on an unprecedented scale. Some historians, early and modern, have believed that the main factor in the pre-dynastic Qin state’s eventual success over six rival kingdoms was the set of roads it laid out in Shu (modern Sichuan) during the late fourth century BCE, which allowed the efficient exploitation of the area’s minerals and foodstuffs by the Qin court at Xianyang hundreds of miles away.
the stepped hierarchy of the classical-era roadways reflected the supposedly “natural” hierarchies prevailing in human society, with the Middle Path of the widest and most level “highways".
Though generally perceived as natural and organic systems, the roads, like the waterways, presumably required constant human intervention and adjustment to insure their functioning. Hence the imposition of an unambiguous hierarchy of main thoroughfares to secondary paths, as well as routine checks on the number and quality of contacts between units.
the dynasty hoped to control the flow of people, things, and ideas as much as possible, lest too much commerce and too much movement disrupt subject populations engaged in sedentary agriculture, the basis of stable rule within civil society.
Obliterated Itineraries: Pueblo Trails, Chaco Roads, and Archaeological Knowledge
we have imposed a dichotomy on the data, distinguishing between “roads” on the one hand and paths, pathways, tracks, and trails on the other. To this way of thinking, roads reflect intentionality. Someone had them built – with all the agency the term entails – so that they are “meaningful” features in their own right. Paths, in contrast, are seen as a passive byproduct of some more “natural” activity that is purposeful only in the most functional sense.
Trails and paths are seen as reflections of less complex societies, in which the overt forms of action embodied by roads are seen to be unlikely. Roads portray order, rule, and control, symbolizing status, authority and their entangled associations: all characteristics thought relevant only for cases of “complexity".
Sarah Harrison (2003) takes on the case of the famous Icknield Way, an apparently ancient route running across southern England. “Perhaps the most striking thing about the idea of a continuous, prehistoric, Icknield Way,” she writes, “is that the main concepts underpinning it are no longer fully accepted by archaeologists, but are rooted in outmoded concepts of prehistoric settlement, economy and society” (Harrison 2003, 5).
Here I am interested in exploring one particular truism – that roads uniquely “fix” space, and thus impose order on movement. The apparent permanence of roads is worth examining in greater detail because it pertains to the idea that all other sorts of routes are wandering and ephemeral. Numerous references to the allegedly expedient and transitory nature of paths and trails can be found in the archaeological literature on the subject (e.g., Crawford 1960, 75).
A review of the evidence indicates that what might be described as emplacement – the physical inscription of movement into the landscape – is a widely distributed phenomenon associated with human travel in many times and circumstances. It is also clearly not a feature of roads alone but is widely associated with paths and trails as well.
It is evident that emplaced trails channeled human movement through landscapes for lengthy periods of time, fixing space in a way analogous to that usually argued for roads. At a minimum this implies that the role of construction and formality in landscapes of movement is less straightforward than is often acknowledged. Payson Sheets (2009) has recently suggested that any symbolism associated with fixed movement clearly has its origins in the experience of travel along trails and paths rather than as new ideas imposed by roads. His own case study, drawn from Costa Rica, suggests that the construction of sunken roads and entryways in Central American chiefdoms was a strategy designed to mimic the entrenched pathways of earlier eras.
formality in landscapes of movement is what you make of it, since landmarks produced by action and landmarks produced by intention are intrinsically related. In other words, whether a road was built by a particular leader or whether it was produced by generations of people walking the route, it might ultimately be perceived in the same way.
Roads, paths, and trails imply not simply communication but connection, which is not the same thing. It may seem simplistic to say that the essential function of these features is to connect, but how they establish such connections makes them particularly complex and interesting. Instead of discussing what paths, trails, and roads did, we must examine what they were – places with particular characteristics associated with movement. And movement is not a “neutral” or value-free process. It engages links and boundaries, opportunities and barriers, belonging and exclusion.
Where roads are distinct – as particular landscapes of movement – lies not in the fact that they fix movement in place but that they manipulate the symbolism of movement to prioritize particular relationships
It is true that roads and trails as phenomena cannot be entirely stripped of functional and sociopolitical corollaries. Wheeled vehicles have certain requirements, as do armies on the march, and the labor mobilization associated with societies organized at larger scales is, cross-culturally, an essential component of road construction. But these characteristics are a matter of context and degree, rather than a fundamental element of the concept.
Road building thus reconfigures the signature of travel in its various manifestations in order to inscribe particular relationships into the landscape. Viewing roads, paths and trails as landmarks of connection, whether organic or materialized (in the sense of De Marrais et al. 1996; Snead 2009), thus allows archaeologists to see them differently and perhaps to understand them in new ways.
Roads, paths and trails are an element of the archaeological record that can truly be treated in a comparative fashion. People do walk from A to B, and did so in the Paleolithic as well as today. the ubiquity of movement provides a stage on which various elements of human drama are played out.
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