Mongol Period Urban Sites and Their Hinterland in Comparison: Karakorum and Khar Khul Khaany Balgas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Campsite to Capital – Mobility Patterns and Urbanism in Inner Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With its sparse population and few forest coverage, Mongolia is ideally suited for a wide array of surveying methods and as a consequence for landscape archaeological approaches. The proposed paper particularly looks into power and authority as expressed within the landscape. Two valleys in Mongolia will be compared. Both were partially covered by systematic pedestrian surveys carried out by a joint collaboration of Bonn University with colleagues from the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in 2017 and 2018. The Khanui and Orkhon valleys with their large settlement sites dating to the Mongol period serve as perfect case studies. With special emphasis on the Mongol period but including other historic periods also evident within the retrieved materials the following questions will be addressed: How was the landscape used? In which ways can we detect strategies of power in the material record? How is power enacted by objects, sites and landscapes? The paper presents preliminary analyses of the surveys from 2017 and 2018 to approach these questions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Campsite to Capital – Mobility Patterns and Urbanism in Inner Asia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23749