Hunter - Herder - Horsemen: The Dawn of Monumental Landscapes

This article first appeared in ISAW Newsletter 24, Spring 2019.

Workshop organized by Ursula Brosseder (ISAW Visiting Research Scholar).

This workshop brought together a specialized group of international scholars, presenting recent results of their current archaeological fieldwork projects in Mongolia—much of it still unpublished. The meeting was initiated in order to discuss dynamics of cultural change between the Paleolithic Period up to the Early Iron Age along the two major transitions in three parts.

The first one concerns the question of how and when hunter-gatherers began to engage with animal husbandry, an aspect we discussed based on evidence from two very different landscapes: the Gobi oasis dweller in south Mongolia (Lisa Janz) and from a valley in northern Mongolia (Nicolas Zwyns). In the second part two outstanding projects dealing with pastoral societies were presented: While Julia Clark discussed modelling of pastoral adaptation, Jean-Luc Houle introduced a unique campsite stratigraphy which exhibits thousands of years of almost continuous occupation providing insights into changes in herd management. The second major transition we focused on is the transition from herder to horsemen as intensified horseback riding is accompanied by fundamental cultural changes visible in the emergence of monumental landscapes, such as the ritual landscape around Maikhan Tolgoi in Central Mongolia (Ursula Brosseder). The dynamic societal processes that were put in motion and culminated in the age of heroes, the importance of horse sacrifice and its relationship to the Scythian culture (Jan Bemmann). The final discussion directed by ISAW professors Sören Stark and Roderick Campbell was lively and opened up new lines of investigations.