See below for our research questions, methodology, limitations, and team.
The Silk Roads are often spoken of as an important phenomenon in the history of globalization, and a handful of long-distance travelers across Eurasia (the best known being Marco Polo) may be mentioned in the same breath. But what routes did these travelers follow? To what extent did they "travel the Silk Road", as if that were a well-established highway? Did they travel the same routes as one another, or did each one independently pick his way across the landscape from one end of Asia to the other? How did these travelers' routes relate to the physical terrain and patterns of human settlement and cultures along the way?
After studying the history and geography of Silk Road, primarily through Valerie Hansen's textbook The Silk Road: A New History with Documents, each member of the class was assigned a traveler for whom some documentation is available. Each student then read through the texts, did some further research as necessary, and identified as many locations as possible. In most cases, students entered these in one or more Google Sheets spreadsheets, which was then uploaded to Google My Maps to create a map for each traveler. Where possible, lines were then drawn from point to point to indicate the approximate route the traveler appears to have taken. These are the individual maps found on the travelers' pages. The resulting combination of points and lines was downloaded from each individual map as a KMZ file, a specialized type of XML that is used to encode geographic data. The KMZ files were uploaded to a single map to show the approximate routes of all of the travelers, superimposed on a single map.
Students were also assigned to research and write short articles about important features of the Silk Roads, including trade goods, peoples, and human and natural geography, in order to add context.
This project was constructed in a few months by a team of undergraduates. Naturally, it will not have the polish or authority of a project built over years by graduate students, professors, or professionals. Not all points could be placed on maps; often a record was vague about a location (such as speaking of a region rather than a specific place), or the student was unable to discover the modern place name. For some of these travelers, there are likely to be scholarly articles, perhaps in such fields as historical geography or archaeology, that identify these place names more securely. If we had had another month to refine this project, that would have been the next step. Further, no-one in the class reads Asian languages or Russian, which would have opened up a great deal more scholarship to us.
This project was built in the fall semester of 2021 by a student team at Pitt Greensburg as part of our class on the Silk Roads.