Sweet Briar College anthropologist Claudia Chang highlights the latest research conducted on settlements in the Talgar region of southeastern Kazakhstan in an Archaeological Institute of America lecture at Lawrence University.
Chang presents the slide-illustrated address “Researching the Eurasian Steppe: Excavations and Surveys along the Silk Route of Southeastern Kazakhstan” Thursday, March 6 at 7:30 p.m. in Lawrence’s Wriston Art Center auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. An informal reception with the speaker follows the address.
Chang will outline the evolution of communities of the Talgar region on the northern side of the Tian Shan Mountains of modern Kazakhstan, tracing developments from the Bronze Age (1700-900 B.C.) through the Islamic and Mongolian periods of Medieval settlement (700-1500 A.D.). She will discuss the the agricultural and pastoral nomadic economic cycles on the steppe and the relationship between burial traditions and settlement sites.
A specialist in Iron Age archaeology of the Eurasian steppe, Chang joined the faculty at Sweet Briar in 1995 after spending a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the Kazakh State University in Kazakhstan. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology at the State Univeristy of New York-Binghamton.
