Project Details
Projekt
Households and demography at the time of the Mongol Empire – Comparing two valleys of Central Mongolia
Applicant
Dr. Susanne Reichert
Subject Area
Prehistory and World Archaeology
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468897144
Common notions of ecological foundations deemed necessary for the survival of cities would negate the very existence of such sites in the eastern steppes. With Karakorum, the former capital of the Mongol Empire in the Orkhon valley, and Khar Khul Khaany Balgas in the Khanui valley, we focus on two such cities. While we know where the people lived in broad, geographical terms, we do neither know how they lived nor how many they were. To ascertain people’s impact on their environment, we first need to arrive at a better understanding of their economic pursuits and scales of resource exploitation from their surroundings. Archaeologists of Bonn University have been invested in the archaeological exploration of Karakorum for more than twenty years, but all interpretations based on only one case study will lack plausibility, if similarly studied comparative data is missing. The research group and this subproject more specifically will therefore work within a strict systematic comparative framework. Comparative work among these cities has rarely been done so far and provides new avenues for a deeper understanding of Mongolian steppe urbanism. Recent surveys by Bonn University helped to shed light on the layout of the cities themselves, but we have only limited information of individual houses and their inhabitants. Moreover, archaeological research endeavors at Khar Khul Khaany Balgas have been very few so far. The site can thus be deemed as highly understudied and also almost untouched at the same time, which makes it a highly worthwhile object of study for the proposed project and a perfect testing ground to evaluate the urban impacts proposed within this research scheme. This project will approach these questions through 1) systematic pedestrian survey around satellite settlements and residences north of Karakorum with a focus on the identification of resource sites, 2) excavations in different areas of Khar Khul Khaany Balgas to uncover a variety of households and to establish the city’s timeline, as well as 3) excavations in a kiln site for the production of probably ceramic building materials nearby the city. These will be the first excavations in the city itself with modern digital techniques and procedures. These endeavors feed into the core question of urban impacts: the goal is to get a firm grip of the economic activities of households within Khar Khul Khaany Balgas, of the varied uses of the landscape north of Karakorum and furthermore of those activities which come with a heavy burden on resources (wood, water, clay) and waste products (exhaust gases, ash, slags), such as metal workshops or the operation of firing kilns. The results will contribute to key areas A (settlement system), B (utilization of resources), and C (provisioning the city). Taken together, the results will provide a fundamental background to explain the signals we will hopefully see in the environmental data gathered for key area D (environmental conditions).
DFG Programme
Research Units
