An archaic fabric: Culture and landscape in an early Inner Asian oasis (3rd--4th century C.E. Niya)

The early history of Inner Asian cultures has until recently tended to neglect documents of everyday life. The present dissertation is a textual and geographical study of aspects of the landscape and culture of the ancient country of Kroraina, which was situated in the southeastern Tarim basin (Chinese central Asia) in about the 3rd and 4th centuries C.E. More than a thousand documents in a dialect of the Gandhari language have been discovered at the ruins of Krorainic sites, consisting mainly of legal and administrative documents, written in the Kharos&dotbelow;t&dotbelow;hi script on wooden tablets. In the study of these documents as ethnographic sources, a thesis of a fundamental relationship of archaic forms of kinship to the landscape is suggested, through a close comparison of the texts with the archaeological contexts of their discovery. A brief historiography of these documents is given, followed by a situation of their historical study within the natural environment and human geography of the Tarim basin. Contextualizing the documents more closely within the site which where the bulk of them were discovered (the Niya site or ancient Cad&dotbelow;´ota), an image of the spatial structure of the oasis landscape is developed. Through the analysis of the residence and kinship relations of individuals known in the documents from this oasis, in comparison with the archaeological contexts of different groups of documents, the affiliation of individuals to particular settlements and territories is established. This reconstruction allows for the analysis in space of marriage exchanges between the territories of different kinship groups. Cross-cousin marriage or generational marriage exchange between territorially localized groups is documented, and in comparison with historical parallels in the region, several aspects of Krorainic culture are seen to display archaic features and historical and geographical relationships with other ancient culture areas in the region.