In a post on the Leiden Islam Blog, team member Marie Favereau considers that if we want to understand the dynamics of the Golden Horde, we need to disregard national borders. Read the full blog here.

Team member Dr Marie Favereau presented a talk entitled“The Golden Horde”.at the international conference Empires to be Remembered (organized by the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften) at Vienna on November 26.

She will also be giving a talk at the international conference The Mamluk Sultanate and its Neighbors: Economic, Social and Cultural Entanglement (organized by the Annemarie-Schimmel Research College “History and Society during the Mamluk Era, 1250-1517” of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Bonn) at Bonn on December 18. The title of the talk will be “The Mamluk sultanate and the Golden Horde:  Tension and Interaction”.

On November 18th, the project team held a workshop with Dr. Zvezdana Dode, a Senior Researcher at the Rostov-on-Don branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who specializes on the reconstruction of costumes and textiles of the medieval populations of the Western Eurasian Steppe and the Caucasus Region. Her research shows that there is a major influence of nomadic equestrian cultures and practices on the development of the traditional adornment of the diverse communities in that region. Dr. Dode focused especially on the periods of the Turk-Khazar and Mongol imperial domination, when the so-called Silk Road exchange attained transcontinental proportions and manifested itself through archaeological remains found in graves. Through careful reconstruction and analysis of this evidence from archeological funerary contexts and its interpretation—and using anthropological, historical, semiotic, visual-arts, and ethnographic approaches— Dr. Dode was able to shed new light on the lives, bodies, material objects, and practices of the medieval nomads, and shared and discussed her newest finds, results, and projects with the team.