Rock Art and Archaeology in the Mongolian Altai, Part 2

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.

The ongoing Khoton Lake project documents several hundred archaeological sites and environmental conditions spanning the past 8,000 years. Forty excavated sites ranging from pre-Neolithic to the Bronze, Iron, Turkic, and medieval periods occur as dwellings, ritual, mortuary, ceremonial, and special-purpose places. In many cases, geophysical orientations, intentional landscape settings, and proximity to rock art panels or clusters are apparent. More than 12,000 individual petroglyphs have been recorded. Direct association of rock art and archaeology is found most conspicuously in Late Bronze Age khirigsuur mounds that include engraved deer stones and Mongolian deer imagery executed on nearby bedrock. Proximity indicates a close relationship between practical lifeways, ritual, and belief rarely found in archaeological settings. Experimental scientific dating shows promise for linking rock art to archaeological cultures. Graphic representations that begin in the Upper Paleolithic and explode during the Bronze Age and later periods yield information that cannot be retrieved from archaeological contexts alone. Combined, these data demonstrate human relationships, behavior, technologies, values, and beliefs in ways that enrich our understanding of Central Asian cultures and their developmental trajectories, traditions, and ecologies.

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): 39987.0