On August 19, Professor Hilde De Weerdt delivered a keynote lecture titled Modelling the Source Ecologies of Chinese Infrastructural History in the Longue-Durée at The 10th Worldwide Conference of the Society for East Asian Archaeology in Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
The modern quantitative history of Chinese city wall construction and abandonment goes back one century, and has been a constitutive part of anthropological, archaeological, historical, geographic, and sociological scholarship on China’s longue-durée past. In this presentation Professor De Weerdt reviews the work of the celebrated archaeologist Li Ji and the century- long datafication of city wall construction in order to assess both the epistemic resonances of such work with earlier practices of information gathering and structuring as well as to consider ways in which the complex relationality of a wide range of historical textual, graphic, and material sources as well as modern archaeological reports can figure into the rewriting of Chinese infrastructural history. This presentation draws on the collective multidisciplinary research project The Lives and Afterlives of Material infrastructures and discusses the project’s key theoretical, methodological, and historiographical findings.