首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
PASSAGE THREE (1) Vast stretches of central Asia feel eerily uninhabited. Fly at 30,000 feet over the southern part of the form
PASSAGE THREE (1) Vast stretches of central Asia feel eerily uninhabited. Fly at 30,000 feet over the southern part of the form
admin
2023-02-17
33
问题
PASSAGE THREE
(1) Vast stretches of central Asia feel eerily uninhabited. Fly at 30,000 feet over the southern part of the former Soviet Union and there are long moments when no town or road or field is visible from your window. The landscape of stark desert, trackless steppe (大草原) , and rugged mountains seems to swallow up anything human. It is little surprise, then, that this region remains largely unknown to most archaeologists.
(2) Wandering bands and tribes roamed this immense area for 5,000 years, herding goat, sheep, cattle, and horses across immense steppes, through narrow valleys, and over high snowy passes. They left occasional tombs that survived the ages, and on rare occasions settled down and built towns or even cities. But for the most part, these peoples left behind few physical traces of their origins, beliefs, or ways of life. What we know of these nomadic pastoralists comes mainly from their periodic forays into India, the Middle East, and China, where they often wreaked havoc and earned a fearsome reputation as enemies of urban life.
(3) In the past century, scholars criticized these people as destructive, dismissed them as marginal, or, at best, cast them as a harsh tonic for restoring vigor to decaying and soft agricultural societies from ancient Mesopotamia to Imperial Rome to Han China. In the 1950’s, a British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler blamed the aggressive, chariot-driving Aryans who swept in from the steppes for the demise of the peaceful Indus River civilization after 1800 B.C., though later archaeologists dismissed that claim.
(4) But Michael Frachetti, a young archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, takes the radical view that Central Asians were early midwives in the birth of civilization rather than a destructive force. Frachetti argues that ancient pastoralists living in the third millennium B.C., at the time of the first great cities of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus, created a network stretching across thousands of miles that passed along goods, technologies, and ideas central to urban life. He believes they helped create civilization rather than hindering it.
(5) Most archaeological work in Central Asia during the past century has focused on the open and rolling plains that stretch from the Black Sea to Manchuria. These steppes only came to life after 2000 B.C., when horse domestication and riding suddenly turned a forbidding landscape for pedestrians into a natural highway of grass.
(6) By contrast, the areas to the south of the steppes have long been dismissed as backwaters of history. In the past, these southern mountains and deserts were considered too remote, rugged, and inhospitable to have played a role in early migrations or the emergence of urban life. The Karakum Desert, where it might rain once in a decade, covers nearly two-thirds of today’s Turkmenistan, while the perpetually snow-covered Tian Shan Mountains of western China and eastern Kyrgyzstan soar 24,000 feet into the thin air. It is there that Frachetti and a new generation of archaeologists from the United States and Central Asian nations are discovering evidence of a network of pastoralists who thrived centuries before hooves resounded on the steppes to the north. These forgotten peoples may have carried such markers of civilization as ceramics and grains across thousands of miles, two millennia before the Silk Road linked the Roman Empire with Han China. Frachetti argues that the new data emerging from the region force archaeologists to rethink their ideas about trade across Eurasia during the Bronze Age, when the first civilizations were taking form to the east, south, and west.
(7) Frachetti, who has studied modern-day pastoralists in such unforgiving landscapes as the Sahara and Scandinavia, was drawn to the southern region of Central Asia for its environmental diversity of desert, grassland, and meadows. Instead of a wasteland, he saw an ideal landscape for enterprising herders who wanted to pasture their animals in all seasons. Together with his colleagues, Frachetti began digging a decade ago in the Dzhungar Mountains of Kazakhstan. Covering nearly 500 square miles, this region lies between the Tian Shan and Altai mountain ranges, and boasts sharp peaks topping 12,000 feet, as well as harsh desert. At a site near a village called Begash, on a flat terrace enclosed by steep canyon walls alongside a small stream, the team uncovered the foundations of simple stone structures along with an array of potsherds (陶瓷碎片) and bronze and stone artifacts in stone-lined oval and rectangular tombs. The earliest layers at Begash date to at least as early as 2500 B. C. , based on alpha magnetic spectrometry dating of organic remains, says Frachetti. One woman was laid to rest with a bell-shaped hooked bronze earring around 1700 B.C., according to electron spin resonance dating. Similar earrings are only found several centuries later some 600 miles to the north on the Siberian steppes, hinting at styles that moved north over time.
(8) More surprisingly, the excavators found wheat, which was first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, and broomcorn millet that was first widely grown in northern China. The grains were used ritually in a burial, and radiocarbon dating of the remains dates them to about 2200 B.C., making them the oldest known domesticated grains in Central Asia. The people of Begash may not have grown either grain—there are no grinding stones, a sign of grain preparation—but instead received it via trade networks stretching from the Near East to China.
(9) Dorian Fuller, a leading expert in ancient grains based at University College London, calls the finds " important and well dated. " He adds that Chinese crops such as millet began to appear in southwest Asia around 1900 B. C. , a few centuries after they reached Begash, which could mean the passage through the mountain regions was a means of gradual transmission from east to west. Frachetti speculates that the grains may have been acquired from other tribes and used for ritual purposes, and then perhaps were passed on in turn to other pastoral peoples.
(10) What makes the Begash discoveries so important is that previously this region was assumed to have been a land of scattered foragers (狩猎者) until steppe peoples trickled down into the area’s valleys and mountain ranges after 2000 B. C. But it is becoming evident that the people of Begash were not simple foragers, but sophisticated pastoralists who tended their flocks, much as people in the area still do today. The inhabitants did not begin to use horses until well into the second millennium B.C., and the varieties of sheep and goat found here today appear to be related to the varieties first domesticated thousands of years before in western Iran, near ancient Mesopotamia. This indicates that Begash was " at the crossroads of extremely wide networks among Eurasian communities by the third millennium B.C.," asserts Frachetti. That doesn’t mean that traders traversed thousands of miles in this early period. Instead, the archaeologist envisions pastoralists taking their flocks to higher pastures in the summer, where they encountered neighbors from other valleys doing the same. Thus, ideas and technologies might have passed gradually through the mountain corridors of southern Central Asia. This corridor, Frachetti believes, may have been a key conduit for Bronze Age developments farther into East Asia and Mongolia.
Frachetti was initially interested in the areas to the south of the steppes because of________.
选项
答案
C
解析
事实细节题。根据人名关键词和行文顺序定位至第七段。该段第一句解释了弗拉切蒂研究该地区的原因是被这里沙漠、草原和草甸的环境多样性所吸引,故答案为C。文中虽然提到了这里自然环境恶劣,但并未说这是弗拉切蒂对该地区感兴趣的原因,故排除A;根据第六段后半部分,这一区域的历史作用正是弗拉切蒂等新一代考古学家提出的,因此B和D所述均是他们对此地开展发掘和研究后的发现,而不是弗拉切蒂最初被吸引到这里的原因。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/2ucD777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
[A]Youarenotalone[B]Don’tfearresponsibilityforyourlife[C]Paveyourownuniquepath[D]Mostofyourfea
TheInternetaffordsanonymitytoitsusers,ablessingtoprivacyandfreedomofspeech.Butthatveryanonymityisalsobehind
TheInternetaffordsanonymitytoitsusers,ablessingtoprivacyandfreedomofspeech.Butthatveryanonymityisalsobehind
TheInternetaffordsanonymitytoitsusers,ablessingtoprivacyandfreedomofspeech.Butthatveryanonymityisalsobehind
StateandlocalauthoritiesfromNewHampshiretoSanFranciscohavebegunbanningtheuseoffacial-recognitiontechnology.The
Anentirelynewlandscapeisemergingwithtechnologyoptionscentraltotheworkandpossiblyyourbusinessmodel:workautomat
检查设备单板温度显示如下框中所示,对单板温度正常的判断是___①_____,如果单板温度异常,首先应该检查____②____。②
与电子政务相关的行为主体主要有三类,即政府、企(事)业单位及居民。因此,政府的业务活动也主要围绕着这三类行为主体展开。政府与政府、政府与企(事)业单位以及政府与居民之间的互动构成了5种不同的、却又相互关联的领域。其中人口信息采集、处理和利用业务属于____
阅读以下关于嵌入式实时系统设计的相关技术的描述,回答问题。【说明】某公司长期从事嵌入式系统研制任务,面对机器人市场的蓬勃发展,公司领导决定自主研制一款通用的工业机器人。王工承担了此工作,他在广泛调研的基础上提出:公司要成功地完成工业机器人项目的研制,应
随机试题
【2011年第54题】常用钢筋混凝土的重度为下列哪一数值?
电热张拉预应力筋是一种很好的方法,下列选项中不属于电热法施工特点的是( )。
一次性注射针筒
在金融工程的运作步骤中,识别金融问题的实质与根源是()。
2007年,王某将市区住房出租给柳某用于居住,取得租金2万元,该房产原值40万元,房产税的扣除比例为20%,则王某缴纳的房产税是()元。
甲公司为一生产制造企业,其2×19年的财务报告于2×20年4月30日对外报出。甲公司利润分享计划的规定为:根据公司利润情况,销售部门的员工享有公司净利润的3%的奖励。2×20年2月18日,甲公司根据其2×19年的净利润计算得知,应给予销售人员的奖励总额为6
旅游者心脏病猝发,导游人员应()
九寨沟海拔在2000米以上,遍布原始森林,沟内分布108个湖泊。()
100个自然数的和是10000,且这100个自然数中奇数比偶数多,那么偶数最多有()个。
Scientistsfindthathard-workingpeoplelivelongerthanaveragemenandwomen.Careerwomenarehealthierthanhousewives.Evi
最新回复
(
0
)