Remagining Borders -- Határ: Open frontier or Border Checkpoint?

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In the chaotic years of WW II in the Pacific Theatre, the 500,000 years old bones of Peking Man were crated up to be shipped to the United States for safety.   The cache of 6 skull caps and other bones collected near Peking (now Beijing), firmly established Homo erectus and fire-making within the chain of human evolution. The shipment never arrived, mysteriously lost in its planned crossing.

An archeological intrigue of a different sort is the discovery of 4000-year-old mummies in the Tarim Basin of Western China, revealing individuals with light hair, fair skin and a textile weave among other markers that muddle facile interpretation. Collation of diverse data-points of the Xinjiang mummies point to multivalent vectors of human movement, contact and exchange.

This paper reviews historic movement, dislocation and displacement, war-torn border-crossings, as well as human mobility in pursuit of commerce, opportunity and adventure. It explores movements of nomadic pastoralists: Scythians, Sarmatians, and confederate Xiongnu across the Asian steppes; South Siberian and Altai transhumance; and the emboldened move of mounted pastoralists from the Urals, up the Danube into the Carpathian Basin.

Broad examination of the cross-currents of human traffic is sharply focused by personal memory of the author here on site 67 years ago navigating the 8-month portal for processing 1956 Hungarian refugees through Camp Kilmer. For better or for worse, emerging concepts of nation-state, defined by borders, quotas and passports in the 20 th century, and smuggling, have subverted the age-old, noble
call of the Határ.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mrea Csorba, Ph.D is an art historian with 28 year teaching career at alma mater University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her continued research interest is the interface of nomadic and settled groups of the late Bronze and Iron Age. She published on a North Chinese site of Chang Ping Bai Fu, in the North of Vhina.