Hunting Strategies and Cattle Management: 2500 Years Isotope Data from Tamsagbulag (ca. 8500 – 6000 BP), Mongolia.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Divergent Paths, Shared Histories: Examining Archaeological Trends from the Caucasus to Mongolia" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Tamsagbulag is an Early Neolithic site in eastern Mongolia inhabited by hunter-gatherers from ca. 8500BP. Upon arrival at Tamsagbulag, these hunter-gatherers began to develop and occupy seasonal surface and subsurface dwellings, which continued for at least 2500 years before the site was abandoned. This paper presents a multi-species carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur isotope analysis of faunal remains from several dwellings in Tamsagbulag. This data and our zooarchaeological analysis provide insight into the diet and mobility patterns of animals exploited by hunter-gatherers at Tamsagbulag. These data further support the prevailing hypothesis about indigenous wild cattle management in Mongolia around 7800BP and refine our understanding of hunting strategies adopted by people who occupied Tamsagbulag. We also assess the impact of climatic amelioration and human interaction on the diet and mobility patterns of cattle over 38,000 years. Our data shows remarkable change in cattle diet from one composed mainly of C3 plants during the Pleistocene to a more C4 diet during the early Holocene. The pattern further changed from the Bronze Age into the Turkic period, with a gradual return to the C3 dominant diet. We attribute these changes to variations in temperature and precipitation between the Pleistocene and Holocene and human intervention.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Divergent Paths, Shared Histories: Examining Archaeological Trends from the Caucasus to Mongolia

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52648