The Human Place in Northern Mongolian Food Webs

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Mongolian culture has been defined by nomadic pastoralism for nearly 5,000 years. Throughout that time, nomadic pastoralists built a specific niche in their local ecosystems. The Darkhad Depression of Northern Mongolia represents a case where traditional nomadic pastoralist lifestyles are at the forefront of the climate catastrophe despite these practices being sustained for thousands of years. Human-inclusive food web studies are one way that archaeological techniques can be used as tools for resolving modern ecological questions about resilience and sustainability in the face of climate change. Food webs are ecological networks linking consumers and resources within an ecosystem, i.e., who eats whom. When modern food webs are combined with archaeological data, the role of humans within their local ecosystems can be extrapolated back in time to gain deeper understandings of humans’ roles in and impacts on their ecosystems. This is especially important when asking questions about how certain practices can be sustained for thousands of years and how those practices entrench humans into specific ecological roles. Here, we plan to present the preliminary results from ethnographic interviews of nomadic pastoralists about their niche in the local ecosystem of the Darkhad Depression and how it has changed throughout their lifetimes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40175.0