Abandoned Cities in the Steppe: Roles and Perception of Early Modern Religious and Military Centers in Nomadic Mongolia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Towns and cities have been an integral part of the Mongolian nomadic society for more than a millennium, and abandoned urban sites from various periods dot the land, inscribing memories of lost empires and long-gone alliances into the cultural landscape. The relation between sedentary urban and mobile pastoralist lifeways has constituted a key cultural, economic, and political factor in one of the major pastoralist formations in Eurasia. The era in which most modern Mongolian cities are rooted is the period of Manchu rule in the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. Subsequent political developments led to the abandonment or forced destruction of many of these urban focal points. Our project will study lost cities of this influential period of Mongolian history to solve the conundrum behind the sociocultural, economic, and political dynamism associated with these religious and military urban centers. In an innovative interdisciplinary approach, the study combines archaeological, historical, and ethnographic methods to trace the entanglement of former significance, historical perception, and current roles and interpretations of abandoned Manchu period urban settlements.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• New Directions in Mongolian Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33246