"A delightful and perceptive read. The author traces the threads which are woven throughout the land and sensory 'scapes of a valley in Armenia: its archaeology, architecture and people's lives, past and present. She argues that, like other places across Afro-Eurasia, this valley and its people reveal their part in the wider 'scape' of a cosmopolitan medieval world, the Silk Roads."--Susan Whitfield, author of Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road "Culminating in a tasty stew shared in a medieval Armenian caravanserai, Kate Franklin's feminist analysis of different scales of the material culture of hospitality and its powers turns the heroic travel narratives of what we call the Silk Road inside out, recapturing the overlapping spacetimes of moving and staying that co-created the everyday cosmopolitanisms of the medieval world. A critical tour de force."--Francesca Bray, author of Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered "This is a thought-provoking work of modern scholarship, a perfect marriage of historical theory and archaeological investigation. Works concentrating on the non-European world are often concerned with regional outlooks, seldom addressing larger issues of world history. Franklin's book, on the other hand, brings the local perspective to a global context, contributing meaningfully to the emerging field of Global Middle Ages.

"--Khodadad Rezakhani, author of ReOrienting the Sasanians: East Iran in Late Antiquity . "A master class in constructing an anthropological archaeological argument that incorporates a wide variety of sources in this field and others. Franklin provides us with a fresh new path along a well trodden road." --Joshua Wright, University of Aberdeen.