'This world is an inn:' Cosmopolitanism and caravan trade in late medieval Armenia

This project is an archaeological exploration of late medieval (AD 12 th--14th c) cultures of travel and trade in Armenia and western Eurasia. By approaching as a culture of practice what has previously been regarded as a total entity (the Silk Road, the thirteenth century world system), this dissertation problematizes universalizing assumptions about the role of the late medieval period in teleological histories (of rational modern subjects, of a systemic modern economy) and thinks through the ways in which late medieval Armenian politics and trade practice consisted of multiple situated projects. The dissertation discusses how such projects were productive of place, whether in written discourse, architecture or material culture---specifically, in the places made by cuisine. Such produced places were inherently political, as constructed cartographies which were simultaneously descriptions or representations of the world, and arguments for the shape of the world and the limits of possibility for acting within it. Working through the ways in which such projects were informed by political traditions, architectural cosmography and (critically) the practices of travelers, this dissertation argues that this culture of practice---of situated cosmological construction, and of the negotiation between such constructions---constituted a cosmopolitanism for late medieval Armenia, defined as a politics not of 'the world' but of worlds. The dissertation centers on the institution of the late medieval road inn (caravanatun in Armenia), a place in particular co-constructed with the practices of transformation by which situated Armenian cosmopolitans worked between worlds of value. Discussions of the road inn as a place which mediated multiple cosmopolitan projects are supported by travelers' accounts, architectural and epigraphic corpuses, and archaeological data. The archaeological research for this project included survey in the Kasakh Valley of Aragatsotn, Armenia and excavations at the early 13th c AD Arai-Bazarjugh caravanatun. This cosmopolitan approach to late medieval travel and trade suggests that the social ramifications of long-distance trade in late medieval Armenia did not consist of confrontations between local and emergent 'world' cultures, but rather posits that cultural understandings of place (such as home and world) were produced in ongoing projects of cosmography what were always also arguments about power.