This study examines major palaeopathological trends in Mongol-period Karakorum and incorporates them into the existing body of research in order to deepen our understanding of health and survival, the impacts of conflict and violence on past populations, and the lived experiences of the city's diverse inhabitants within the broader socio-political landscape of the Mongol Empire. Two distinct groups buried in Karakorum are analyzed: individuals recovered from a mass grave located outside the city walls (MG), and a portion of the Muslim community interred in the city's cemetery (KARCEM). These populations are assessed through macroscopic observation, statistical analysis, and radiographic imaging of palaeopathological markers, with particular attention paid to differences between the two groups. Clear differences emerge between the assemblages. The MG assemblage (n = 13) is composed mostly of males and notably lacks both non-adult and elderly individuals. The occurrence of perimortem trauma consistent with arrowhead injuries and blunt force trauma, along with the funerary context, strongly supports a context of warfare, whereas the demographic profile and comparative patterns of Schmorl's nodes and osteoarthritis prevalence may indicate the presence of combatants in the assemblage. In contrast, KARCEM (n = 27) includes a substantial proportion of non-adult individuals affected by nutritional deficiencies, whereas adults show higher rates of antemortem trauma and degenerative disease. These pathological patterns suggest a settled urban community whose adult members led physically demanding lives, whereas children experienced considerable physiological stress.

This study investigates the effectiveness of drone-based remote sensing and Google Earth satellite imagery for archaeological prospection in the Bayan Gol Valley, Central Mongolia. Utilizing a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with RGB and multispectral sensors, we surveyed 655 ha to document Mongol-period settlement structures dating to the 13th and 14th centuries ce. The resulting high-resolution datasets, including digital surface models, RGB orthomosaics and vegetation index rasters, were compared with five image sets from 2007 to 2021 provided by Google Earth to assess their respective capabilities. The UAV-derived data proved significantly more effective, identifying 16% more archaeological features than the satellite imagery. However, Google Earth imagery provided valuable cost-efficient and multitemporal contextual information. The analysis also considers the impact of modern disturbances, such as agricultural activity and road construction, on feature visibility. These findings emphasize the complementary strengths of elevation and vegetation-based anomaly detection and highlight the value of integrated remote sensing approaches for archaeological mapping in complex and dynamic landscapes. The study contributes to the refinement of UAV methodologies and the broader application of remote sensing in archaeological research.

Dairy pastoralism reached Mongolia during the Early Bronze Age and flourished in the Late Bronze Age alongside the emergence of diverse mortuary practices, including the Deer Stone-Khirgisuur Complex and figure-shaped/Ulaanzuukh burials. While the spread of pastoralism has been widely studied, interactions between these pastoralist groups with distinct mortuary traditions remain underexplored due to challenges in obtaining both genomic and mortuary data. In this study, we analyzed genome-wide and mortuary data from 30 ancient individuals in central Mongolia, a key region where pastoralists with distinct mortuary practices converged. We identify two genetically distinct clusters persisting throughout the Late Bronze Age that correspond to separate burial types, suggesting limited genetic mixing and a maintenance of distinct mortuary practices despite their coexistence. These groups were eventually replaced during the Early Iron Age by the expansion of the Slab Grave population and the establishment of a new burial tradition. Finally, we refine the genetic origin of the Late Bronze Age Deer Stone-Khirgisuur Complex populations, tracing their minor western Eurasian ancestry back to the Eneolithic/Early Bronze Age Afanasievo and Early Bronze Age Khemtseg (Chemurchek) populations. This study provides fine-scaled genetic tracking of major mortuary transitions in prehistoric Mongolia, offering insights into the complex and divergent processes that shaped the ancient pastoralist societies of Asia.

Innovations in horse equipment during the early Middle Ages provided advantages to societies from the steppes, reshaping the social landscape of Eurasia. Comparatively little is known about the precise origin of these crucial advances, although the available evidence points to early adoption in East Asia. The authors present new archaeological discoveries from western and northern Mongolia, dating to the fourth and fifth centuries AD, including a wooden frame saddle with horse hide components from Urd Ulaan Uneet and an iron stirrup from Khukh Nuur. Together, these finds suggest that Mongolian groups were early adopters of stirrups and saddles, facilitating the expansion of nomadic hegemony across Eurasia and shaping the conduct of medieval mounted warfare.

For the first time, a Mongol-era walled enclosure was discovered on the right, eastern bank of the Orkhon in Arkhangai aimag. Its documentation was carried out with a fixed-wing eBee X drone. The design of the settlement, comparative examples and artifacts are briefly described. It was only used during the 13th/14th century CE and testifies to the intensive development of the Orkhon Valley during the Mongol Empire. Орхоны хөндийд шинээр олдсон Монголын эзэнт гүрний үед холбогдох нэгэн хэрэмт суурин /турь/ Товчлол. Архангай аймгийн Өгийнуур сумын нутаг Орхоны голын зүүн эрэгт монголын эзэнт гүрний үед холбогдох нэгэн хэрэмт суурин /турь/-г анхлан илрүүлэн оллоо. Тухайн дурсгалын баримтжуулалтыг сүүлийн үеийн агаар, зайнаас тандан судлалд нэвтэрч буй далавчит “eBee-X” дроноор гүйцэтгэв. Тус өгүүлэлд уг хэрэмт суурины /турийн/ ерөнхий хэлбэр хийгээд олдвор эд өлгийн зүйл зэргийг харьцуулан товч дүгнэлт хийв. Энэхүү турь нь бидний судалгаагаар 13-14-р зууны үед холбогдох бөгөөд Монголын эзэнт гүрний үед Орхоны хөндийн хотжилтын эрчимтэй хөгжлийг харуулах нэгэн гэрч баримт болох юм хэмээн үзэж байна. Түлхүүр үг. Монголын эзэнт гүрэн, Зайнаас тандан судлал, Орхоны хөндий, Хот суурин, Хятад гаралтай ваар, шаазан

Cities in the Eurasian steppes, a core of nomadic empires, are rare. Erecting a city from scratch is even less typical. However, Khar Khul Khaany Balgas, situated north of the Khangai Mountains in central Mongolia, is such an exceptional example, never built over by subsequent settlements. Overlooked until now because researchers dated its latest settlement phase into the 17th century a.d., the first radiocarbon dates and material culture prove its existence during the Mongol empire only. During the past years, we conducted comprehensive geophysical and topographic mapping of the site, as well as a pedestrian survey, including its hinterland, and excavated a kiln. The layout of the city resembles that of the capital, Karakorum. Both cities together reveal that the Mongol Khans had a specific idea about the organization of a city. They were dependent on Chinese craftsmen to erect the buildings but not on Chinese city planning and ideology.

The initial movement of herders and livestock into the eastern steppe is of great interest, as this region has long been home to pastoralist groups. Due to a paucity of faunal remains, however, it has been difficult to discern the timing of the adoption of domesticated ruminants and horses into the region, though recent research on ancient dairying has started to shed new light on this history. Here we present proteomic evidence for shifts in dairy consumption in the Altai Mountains, drawing on evidence from sites dating from the Early Bronze to the Late Iron Age. We compare these finds with evidence for the rise of social complexity in western Mongolia, as reflected in material remains signaling population growth, the establishment of structured cemeteries, and the erection of large monuments. Our results suggest that the subsistence basis for the development of complex societies began at the dawn of the Bronze Age, with the adoption of ruminant livestock. Investments in pastoralism intensified over time, enabling a food production system that sustained growing populations. While pronounced social changes and monumental constructions occurred in tandem with the first evidence for horse dairying, ~1350 cal BCE, these shifts were fueled by a long-term economic dependence on ruminant livestock. Therefore, the spread into the Mongolian Altai of herds, and then horses, resulted in immediate dietary changes, with subsequent social and demographic transformations occurring later.

Not even a dozen burials are known from Neolithic times in the area of modern-day Mongolia. This period is of utmost interest as it constitutes the transitional phase from hunter-gatherer-fisher communities during the Palaeolithic to the introduction of mobile pastoralism around 3000 B.C.E. with the Afanas’evo culture. This article presents new excavation results from a Neolithic burial at “Ölziĭt Denzh” (internal site code KGS-11), near the center of Erdenemandal in Arkhangaĭ Aĭmag, Central Mongolia, and places this burial in the context of the earliest graves in Mongolia. The site consists of nearly 180 indistinct earth mound features, one of which was excavated to verify anthropogenic origin of the identified mounds. All mounds were strongly affected by burrowing animals. The excavation yielded the body of a female in an extremely crouched position. The find inventory contains two unique stone artifacts. Two radiocarbon dates put the burial at the first half of the fourth millennium B.C.E. The other 10 earliest burials from Mongolia fall into two regional groups, one in the Egiĭn Gol valley of northern Mongolia and one in eastern Mongolia; each group displays different burial customs and grave structures. Although it remains to be corroborated by further excavations, the pure earth mounds and their association within a large burial ground at Ölziĭt Denzh seem to be unique aspects of a burial style otherwise unknown for this time and region, as the comparison with the other largely contemporary remains from Mongolia shows. This article therefore aims to draw attention to a potentially new form of burial that has not previously been recognized in the field.

In the thirteenth century AD, the city of Karakorum was founded as the capital of the Mongol Empire. Relatively little archaeological attention, however, has been directed at the site and the phenomenon of steppe urbanism. The authors report new magnetic and topographic surveys of the walled city and the surrounding landscape. The resulting maps reveal the city in unprecedented detail. Combining the magnetic and topographical data with aerial photographs, pedestrian surveys and documentary sources reveals the extent, layout and organisation of this extensive settlement. Road networks and areas of variable occupation density and types of activities deepen our understanding of this important commercial hub and royal palace, which is conceptualised as a form of 'implanted' urbanism.

The Eastern Eurasian Steppe was home to historic empires of nomadic pastoralists, including the Xiongnu and the Mongols. However, little is known about the region's population history. Here, we reveal its dynamic genetic history by analyzing new genome-wide data for 214 ancient individuals spanning 6,000 years. We identify a pastoralist expansion into Mongolia ca. 3000 BCE, and by the Late Bronze Age, Mongolian populations were biogeographically structured into three distinct groups, all practicing dairy pastoralism regardless of ancestry. The Xiongnu emerged from the mixing of these populations and those from surrounding regions. By comparison, the Mongols exhibit much higher eastern Eurasian ancestry, resembling present-day Mongolic-speaking populations. Our results illuminate the complex interplay between genetic, sociopolitical, and cultural changes on the Eastern Steppe.

Cities within a steppe environment and in societies based on pastoral nomadism are an often overlooked theme in the anthropological literature. Yet, with Karakorum, the first capital of the Mongol Empire (AD 1206–1368), we have a supreme example of such a city in the central landscape of the Orkhon valley in Mongolia. In this paper, we ask, what is the city in the steppes? Taking Karakorum as our starting point and case of reference and to attain a better comprehension of the characteristics of urbanism in the steppe, we apply a list of urban attributes compiled by Michael E. Smith ( 2016 ) to provide a thick description of Karakorum. The discussion not only comprises comparisons to other contemporary sites in Russia and Mongolia, but also addresses in detail the question of city–hinterland relations as a fundamental necessity for the survival of the city in an anti-urban environment. The analysis shows that during the Mongol period we can identify urbanism but no urbanization: there is no process of independent, natural growth of cities carried out by the population, but cities are “political” in the sense that they are deeply intertwined with the authority and have therefore much to tell about the relation between power and authority on the one hand and the ruled on the other.

Reviewed by: Karabalgasun – Stadt der Nomaden: Die archäologischen Ausgrabungen in der frühuigurischen Hauptstadt 2009–2011by Burkart Dähne Jan Bemmann Karabalgasun – Stadt der Nomaden: Die archäologischen Ausgrabungen in der frühuigurischen Hauptstadt 2009–2011[Karabalgasun – City of Nomads: The Archaeological Excavations in the Early Uyghur Capital 2009–2011]. Burkart Dähne. Forschungen zur Archäologie Außereuropäischer Kulturen Band 14 [ Research on the Archaeology of Non-European Cultures, vol. 14]. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2017. x, 236 pp., 109 illustrations. Hardbound 110€, ISBN 9783954901265. Urbanism has been one of the main topics in the humanities for the past two decades. Today, about 54 percent of the world population lives in cities and more than 80 percent of the populations in highly developed countries is urban. These numbers may explain why urbanism is such an important issue for geographers, sociologists, architects, and urban planners. Early cities and early states, which are connected to 'civilizations', dominate historical and archaeological studies even though they covered only 5 percent of the world. This implies that about 95 percent of the globe remains unconsidered. The steppes of Inner Asia is one of these neglected regions mainly for two reasons: their inaccessibility for researchers from highly developed Western countries and the ongoing focus of archaeologists on pastoral nomadic lifeways and their sometimes monumental burials. Only very few international teams from Russia, Japan, and Germany have begun to explore urban sites in Mongolia since the 1990s. Burkart Dähne was a member of such a team and presents in this monograph the results of recent excavations in the largest city of the Turco-Mongol era in Inner Asia, the capital of the Uyghur empire ( c.e. 744–840) Ordu Baligh with the modern name Karabalgasun. The city occupies more than 30 km 2and is situated in the Orkhon Valley, a pasture-rich region in the center of modern Mongolia. In 2007, the German Archaeological Institute started to explore Karabalgasun, which was until then only known by a topographic survey carried out by the first scientific expedition to the Orkhon Valley in 1891 and by two small-scale but mostly unpublished excavations by Kotwicz in 1912 and Kiselev in 1947. An airborne laser scan (LIDAR) conducted in 2007 provided a first idea about the extent of the city and an excellent topographic planning guide for further excavations. Together with Ulambayar Erdenebat, Burkart Dähne was the local head of the excavation until the retirement of the responsible director of the mission, Hans-Georg Hüttel, in 2011, which obviously brought a change in staff and excavation strategy. This circumstance may explain why Dähne regrets in his report several times that the excavations in these parts were discontinued. As a consequence, the construction and layout of the building could not be understood in their entirety. The monograph is Dähne's nearly unchanged dissertation, which was supervised by Ulrich Veit and Hans-Georg Hüttel and completed at the University of Leipzig in 2015. It presents the relevant excavation results from 2009 through 2011, but only the architectural features are discussed and illustrated, not the findings. The author's aims are twofold: first, to introduce the site of Karabalgasun and analyze the excavated buildings and features (pp. 11–135); and, second, to explore the meaning of urban centers and the urbanization of the Inner Asian steppes (pp. 137–153). He thinks that the transition of pastoral nomadism to sedentism is one of the most radical forms of social and cultural changes during antiquity and medieval times (p. 5). This transition, however, would imply that the local herders inhabited the few newly founded cities in the steppes, which is very unlikely. Dähne does not ask the question who lived in the city, however. Summaries in German, English, Mongolian, and Russian are provided at the end of the main text of the book (pp. 155–177). An appendix offers a list of the excavated features (mistakenly labeled as a [End Page 204]catalogue), a transliteration of Mongolian sites and names, and references (pp. 179–235). Dähne introduces his volume with the general geographic setting of the site. Karabalgasun is situated in the same...

This paper gives a state of the art report of an ongoing interdisciplinary project on bioarchaeological research on cemeteries in the Upper Orkhon valley, Central Mongolia, in particular at the Maikhan Tolgoi site. The archaeological focus is on the investigation of the development, use and transformation of a ritual landscape in the course of the Bronze and Iron Age. The contribution of physical anthropology is an osteological and archaeometric analysis of the human inhumations with regard to life-style and subsistence economy. A specific topic relates to the emergence of the first mounted nomads in the region. Macro- and microscopical inspection of the skeletons excavated to date reveal that males, females and children had been buried at this exceptional cemetery, and that many of the adults died at a conspicuously advanced age. Palaeodiet was reconstructed by stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in bone collagen, followed by an isotopic sourcing. We show that freshwater fish was consumed on a regular basis, and that the demands of protein and carbohydrate were largely covered by secondary animal products. First analysis of stable strontium and oxygen isotopes in bone apatite suggests a considerable catchment area of the burial site.

Several khirigsuurs, slab graves, and other stone structures were excavated during rescue excavations in the Middle Orkhon Valley in 2006 and 2007. The information from these excavations provides the most extensive data—including the first large series of radiocarbon dates—on the Bronze Age and Early Iron Ages from central Mongolia. Contrary to what some have asserted, it becomes clear that khirigsuurs always served as graves for one individual also in this part of the country. Our discussion of slab graves highlights the particular custom of animal scapula depositions in specific graves as well as the removal of the head/skull, both, in our view, ritual practices. The investigation of three structures along the Khöshöö Tsaĭdam road revealed a much greater diversity of monument types in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages than had previously been recorded and illustrates the growing complexity of those periods beyond the traditional narratives centering around the monument types of khirigsuurs, slab graves, and deer stones.

We investigated the potential of the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) method to date young (<1000 years) samples collected in the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape, Mongolia. Quartz showed an infrared signal; therefore the post-IR OSL method was applied to small aliquots which are considered proxies for single grain measurements. Statistical analysis of the dose distribution produced CAM De of 5.14±0.10 Gy and over dispersion of 47.5%, and MAM De of 3.7±0.6 Gy. Since no partial bleaching was suspected, the analysis of signal composition was done and the fast quartz post-IR OSL lead to De of 4.9±0.2 Gy. Based on the quartz fast component and CAM De we propose the new chronology of ancient construction at 785±80 AD, rather than 906-1125 AD as suggested by archaeological evidence. However, the MAM age is in good agreement with independent age control for construction of the ramparts suggesting the date of reconstruction, collapse or reuse for the square walled enclosure MOR3 during 1090±80AD.