Prehistoric Mongolian Archaeology in the Early 21st Century: Developments in the Steppe and Beyond

Journal of Archaeological Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-020-09152-y Prehistoric Mongolian Archaeology in the Early 21st Century: Developments in the Steppe and Beyond Joshua Wright1 © The Author(s) 2021 Abstract There has been a great increase in archaeological research in Mongolia since 2000. Increasingly precise chronologies, regional studies, and the growth of developmentdriven archaeology are transforming our knowledge of this key region of northeastern Asia. This review summarizes recent work and provides a narrative of the prehistoric and medieval cultural sequences as presently understood. I focus on long-standing key topics: early human habitation, the adoption of food-producing economies, Bronze Age social transformations, and the emergence of central places and large polities. I argue that, on the one hand, Mongolia has unique data and new examples to offer the archaeological community and, on the other, that the prehistory of Mongolia and the steppe are not so different from the rest of the world in its history of research and key questions. This review provides general overviews covering the Upper Paleolithic, Epipaleolithic or Neolithic, and Bronze Age to the Xiongnu period; specific data related to each period provide jumping-off points for comparative analysis and further examination. Keywords Mongolia · Hunter-gatherers · Nomadic pastoralism · Monumentality · State origins Introduction Mongolia has seen an explosion of high-quality archaeological research and publication during the first decades of this century. So much so that it is possible for me to write a new, and somewhat unorthodox, narrative of the prehistoric archaeology of Mongolia. In Mongolia we see atypical trajectories for a range of oft-studied topics in archaeology, from the emergence of complex polities, to the transition of huntergatherer subsistence systems, to food production economies, and the construction * Joshua Wright 1 Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, St. Mary’s, Elphinstone Road, Aberdeen AB24 3UF, UK 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Journal of Archaeological Research and maintenance of monumental architecture. These new narratives are made possible by both a wealth of new data and the rich and critical new models of social processes made possible by them. The great growth in archaeological research during this century, especially intensive regional research projects and bioarcheology, has established Mongolia as a locus for global archaeology. The study of nomadic pastoralism and its economic and political structures has perhaps the greatest potential, including the growth of the Xiongnu polity, the monumental burial forms of the Khangai Highlands, novel models of a state built within a political and economic system rooted in mobility rather than central places, and the relationships of labor scale to burial contents. The alternative trajectories that I describe provide contrasts and complements to a range of established models of social change in prehistory. In this review I have focused almost entirely on work published since 2000 with only a few exceptions where reference to earlier research is needed to set the stage for recent work. This review follows a basic chronological sequence, from recent discoveries related to the earliest known inhabitants of Mongolia through the heavily examined Bronze Age and up to the Iron Age and Xiongnu period. Though different data are emphasized in different sections, I discuss modes of habitation and land use among typical inhabitants in each period alongside the coverage of major recent research themes and projects for that period. This review stands on the shoulders of a group of excellent regional and Mongolia-specific reviews and studies carried out over the past decade (Hanks 2010; Honeychurch and Amartuvshin 2007; Honeychurch and Makarewicz 2016; Honeychurch and Wright 2008) and has benefited immeasurably from recent conference and exhibition-based syntheses that have stimulated publication of research (Bemmann et al. 2009; Brosseder and Miller 2011; Fitzhugh et al. 2009; Hanks and Linduff 2009; Sabloff 2011). Also of great note is the increase in the number of radiocarbon dates by projects in Mongolia as the regional research framework moves away from the typological based chronologies of the 20th century. This allows us to narrow the chronological ranges of many previously less-well-defined phenomena and extend others in unexpected directions. The modern nation of Mongolia sits in the center of eastern Eurasia between Russia to the north and China to the south. It is often thought of as a vast homogenous grassland and its archaeology that of the dwellers in this grassland. It is, in fact, a large and diverse territory that is best equated to other large mid-continental regions around the globe. The west is mountainous with arid basins containing lakes and wetlands, and the south is arid, dominated by the Gobi Desert (Fig. 1). The desert is diverse, encompassing poorly watered highlands, extensive gravel flats, marshy seasonal wetlands, volcanic geology, and arid rocky plateaus. A spur of the Altai range extends from the west into the Gobi region and divides western Mongolia between the comparatively better-watered north and arid south. The area east of Mongolia is steppe and mostly a vast grassland broken up by ranges of treeless hills and the long Kherleen River that eventually spreads out into large wetlands and lake basins along and beyond Mongolia’s eastern borders. Central and northern Mongolia are dominated by ranges of low mountains and wide, high-elevation valleys. I refer to this area as the Khangai Highlands. All of Mongolia’s large rivers rise there. The 13 Journal of Archaeological Research Fig. 1  Map of geographical regions and features mentioned in the text. Selenge and the Orkhon drain northward toward Lake Baikal and the Kherleen flows east. This is a well-watered region with upland forests, wide river valleys, steepwalled smaller stream valleys, and intermontane lakes. A Brief History of Archaeology in Mongolia, with an Eye to the 21st Century Mongolia has been a part of world archaeology since the formation of the modern discipline. The roots of archaeology in Mongolia are found in the reports of the Siberian intellectual Yadrintsev (1889) who described the medieval monuments and ruins of the Orkhon Valley and drew the attention of other Russian scholars to them. Shortly thereafter, Radlov’s philological expedition (1892) brought the cities and monuments of the Orkhon Valley, including the bilingual Türk inscriptions there, to a world audience. These inscriptions brought to light the first known indigenous writing system in the Eurasian steppe and linked it to the Turkic empires previously known only from external accounts. In the early 20th century, K. Maskov excavated at the Orkhon city of Kharbalgas (Dähne and Ulambayar 2012). N. C. Nelson and Alonso Pond accompanied the And (...truncated)