Stone tool typology and chronology from late Pleistocene to middle Holocene northwest Mongolia

Summary

Understanding hunter-gatherer adaptations to northern latitude marginal environments such as the Uvs Lake Basin of northern Mongolia is crucial for understanding social historical processes such as the transition to herding and pastoralism. To date, however, the archeological patterns of hunter-gatherer life in this part of the world are notoriously ill-defined, on the one hand because so little attention has been given to them, and on the other because buried, stratified sites have been so elusive. Here we report a preliminary account of stone tool typology from the late Pleistocene to the middle Holocene of the Uvs Lake Basin, northwest Mongolia derived from systematic regional surface survey anchored to an absolute chronology from two stratified sites at Bayaan Nuur, a small, spring-fed lake on the southern margin of the world’s northernmost dune desert.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage