Exploring Bronze Age Mongolian Monuments with Geophysical Methodologies

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For mobile pastoralists, monuments are places of permanence and stability in a landscape inhabited and perceived through movement. It is within these monumental spaces that dispersed peoples gather as a community, and through secular and ritual activities, organize and reaffirm social bonds and institutions, and maintain wider community connections. These dynamics have been an important scholarly focus within anthropological archaeology in many regions of the world. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest and debate in the connection between complex monument construction and deep structural shifts in the social organization of pastoral nomads in Mongolia during the Bronze Age (1800–800 BCE). This presentation will investigate this through the implementation of multiple complimentary geophysical techniques, including fluxgate gradiometry and magnetic susceptibility, at two khirigsuur monumental complexes in Tarvagatai Valley in north-central Mongolia. This innovative research design utilizes novel field methodologies that are non-intrusive and allow archaeologists to analyze the spatial patterning of these spaces in finer detail at a larger scale. This analysis of these spaces creates a more nuanced understanding of the deep relationships between these culturally anchored landscapes and their intrinsically linked communities as we recover further evidence for the locationality of past activities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38936.0