Herbivore Dung Biomarkers: A Reference Collection for the Archaeology of Pastoral Domestic Spaces in Western and Central 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.

Lipid biomarkers such as alkanes, fatty acids, and steroids together with their stable carbon and hydrogen isotope ratios are nowadays leading proxies for the identification of past climate variability, human activities, and animal presence in a site. These can be extracted from modern feces, desiccated dung, and soil sediments. When applied to geoarchaeological contexts, these indicators reveal significant insights on past animal diet, use of space, and paleoenvironment. This paper presents lipid analysis of dung pellets from five livestock species (i.e., goat, sheep, cattle, yak, and horse) retrieved from modern contexts, as means for reference collection for the better characterization of archaeological pastoral domestic deposits. Dung molecular fingerprints are compared to archaeological sediments and well-preserved excrement pellets recovered from winter campsites located in Uvs and Arkhangai provinces. Results suggest that husbandry management and local steppe paleoenvironments can be tracked down through the characterization of herbivore fecal matter. We argue that mass spectrometry methods when applied to pastoral households can help unveil the complexity of pastoral production systems in Mongolia and Central Asia. The research is part of the Western Mongolia Archaeology Project (WKU and Mongolia National Museum) and has been carried out at the AMBI Lab, University of La Laguna.

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): 32902