GIS-Based Spatial Overlay Analysis of Jewelry Resource Distribution, Trade Routes, and Cultural Dissemination along the Silk Road

Abstract

The Silk Road was not just a road for carrying silk, but also a complex network which carried precious minerals from west Asia, complex artifacts and diverse cultural expressions from various regions. The author uses advanced GIS in this research to conduct comprehensive spatial overlay analysis on all the different jewelry resources, trading logistics, and cultural dissemination patterns across the Eurasian landscape, ranging from Han’s geopolitics in 2nd BC through to the Mongol synthesis in 14th AD. This paper formed a powerful layered geodatabase with more than 300 archaeological places, digitized historical text documents, and current geological survey information. The paper proceeds to reconstruct the particular supply chains of important materials such as Khotan nephrite jade, Afghan lapis lazuli, and Balti amber as well. We adopted intensive spatial analyses such as KDE, Viewpoint analysis and the LCP method are used to visualize and analyse the associations among constraints of terrain, source of oases water and the spatial aggregation area with high value of jewelry. The findings imply a clear relationship between some trade nodes and the mixing of jewelry designs, which seems to indicate that it was the “value” (i.e., gold and silver) of the jewelry, which could get through to far and rugged spots better than other goods. overlaying on this, the concept of a non-linear, non-constant form of cultural exchange—more like “radiation” from a central point, not the physical movement of ideas or people, but a nodal effect, where certain “hub” cities became centres for creating a Hellenistic-Persian-Chinese blend before being sent off to outer areas. This work has produced an abstract set of numbers in space allowing us to think about material in the Silky Road of a story, closing the gap between the distribution of those materials to the geography of people.