New Insights on Mobile Pastoralist's Household Ritual Activity: Early Observations from the Excavation of a Mongol period Ephemeral Dwelling in northern Mongolia. 

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Conversations on ritual practice along the Mongolian steppe are often dominated by discussions of monumental architecture that is typified by large stone mounds referred to as "khirigsuurs" or "Deer Stone" steles. Conversely, the idea that ritual space and practice can be considered at the small-scale household has been mostly dismissed. This is in large part due to prior misconceptions about the inability of the archaeologist to identify the ephemeral dwelling spaces of mobile peoples. However, recent discoveries of ephemeral habitations in northern Mongolia has shown that these once-invisible spaces are in fact preserved and identifiable in the archaeological record. The discovery of such dwellings now gives us access to aspects of the mobile pastoralist’s life that have been previously unexamined. Considering the ethnographic work of Rebecca Empson on household ritual space in modern pastoralist’s dwellings in Mongolia, this presentation will explore the idea of ritual practice at the household level while reporting the initial findings of the excavation of a Mongol period housepit in the Tarvagatai Valley of northern Mongolia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Empirical Approaches to Mobile Pastoralist Households   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24260