Melting Ice, High-Altitude Hunting, and Horse Use in the Mongolian Altai

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Around the globe, a rapidly warming climate is exposing organic materials preserved in permanent snow and ice features. In western Mongolia, artifacts melting from ice features in the Altai mountains demonstrate a millennia-long record of the use of high-altitude zones for hunting of large game, particularly argali sheep, by ancient pastoralists. New discoveries reveal hunting technology and strategies as well as in-field processing choices and evidence of regular horse transport even at extreme altitudes. Our results demonstrate the significance of hunting even in specialized pastoral societies in ancient Mongolia, and indicate that, paired with plummeting wildlife populations, contemporary climate warming and ice loss poses a severe threat to pastoral resilience in Inner Asia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37129.0