Settlement Persistence in Northwestern Mongolia: Archaeological and Paleoenvironmental Insights from the Long-Term Occupation Site ZK513

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Exploring Long-Term Pastoral Dynamics: Methods, Theories, Stories" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Mongolian Bronze Age (2500–700 BCE) was a period of greater social interaction and important transformations (e.g., the adoption of domestic livestock herding and intensification to widespread mobile, mounted pastoralism) that prompted social inequality and the formation of the first nomadic states. What is known today from past Mongolian pastoral societies comes primarily from studying highly visible features such as funerary monuments and rock art. However, little is known about the archaeological evidence preserved in their daily contexts. Recently, the excavations at ZK513 winter campsite in Uvs aimag have revealed clear-cut stratigraphic layers originating from recurrent use of the locality for over 4,000 years, with new excavated combustion features and burnt layers containing organic remains such as herbivore dung and bones. Through a multiproxy approach that includes soil micromorphology, zooarchaeology, and lipid biomarkers analyses, we retrieved the micro, macro, and biomolecular signatures left in ZK513 by the recurrent occupation of nomadic pastoralists and their livestock. The integration of distinct but complementary proxies allows us to investigate shifting environmental conditions, anthropic activities, as well as continuities and discontinuities in the occupation. We finally discuss how our combined approach could be applied to other mobile pastoral archaeological contexts in Mongolia and elsewhere.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Exploring Long-Term Pastoral Dynamics: Methods, Theories, Stories

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40216.0