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This dissertation engages with the important theoretical and conceptual issues outlined above by examining the relationship between early pastoralist adaptations and the emergence of social complexity in northern Mongolia’s Darkhad Depression (Figure 2). This research program has examined the ways in which this area contributed to broader social, political and economic change from ca. 2500 BCE– 200 CE. It approaches this topic through an investigation of human-animal-landscape relationships, specifically examining prehistoric subsistence strategies, habitation patterning along the shores of Targan Nuur (Targan Lake), and the emergence of new forms of ritual monument construction and use. To ensure that appropriate data sets were produced for analytical study and interpretation, a combination of the following methods were employed in the field research: (1) systematic pedestrian survey and test pitting, (2) integration of enthnoarchaeological data on contemporary herding and land use patterns, (3) analysis of recovered artifacts and ecofacts, and (4) GIS spatial and environmental analysis and modeling.

This program of research has contributed importantly to recent studies in Mongolia and, more broadly, pastoralist studies and Eurasian steppe archaeology by examining early mobile pastoralists and the key social, political and economic transitions that led to this way of life

(Chang 2008; Cioffi-Revalli et al. 2010; Fitzhugh 2009a; Frachetti 2012; Hanks and Linduff 2009; Honeychurch 2004; Houle 2010; Rogers 2012; Wright 2006).

Figure 2: Map of Mongolia highlighting the Darkhad Depression

Mongolia provides a unique region in which to explore issues of both changing human-environment and social relationships in modern and archaeological contexts. Modern-day Mongolia has been the focus of numerous ethnographic studies of mobile pastoralist peoples -

seasonally, although ethnographic research has shown that such movements may be habitually only a few kilometers per year (Figure 3) (Bazagur 2005; Houle 2009). This traditional lifestyle, lost in many other regions of the world, provides anthropological archaeologists a unique opportunity to study the economic strategies and life-ways of mobile pastoralists within specific types of landscapes and environments.

Figure 3: Seasonal round of one family living in the Darkhad Depression today

Ethnographic studies in Mongolia have frequently focused on cultural ecology (Blench 2005; Damdinsuren et al. 2008; Fernandez-Gimenez 1999b; Neupert 1999; Rassmussen et al.

1999; Sankey et al. 2006) and the interaction and integration of these dispersed populations in the context of the shifting Mongolian state (Soviet and Post-Soviet periods). The political upheaval after the transition from socialism to democracy in the early 1990's has allowed researchers to assess the impact of national political shifts upon small local communities and their environments (Fernandez-Gimenez 1999a, 2002; Sneath 2003; Upton 2008). Such studies

have provided a wealth of information concerning local socio-economic strategies and broader scale networking and supra-regional integration tendencies of pastoralists.

In some cases, cultural ecologists have used a historical approach to better understand the trajectory of pastoral traditions in the region (Endicott 2012; Fernandez-Gimenez 2006). These analyses are able to use records stretching back to the Medieval period (ca. CE 1300) regarding land use and herd structures. There is great potential for archaeologists to work in an inter-disciplinary manner to push this back in time even farther. In particular, understanding how pastoralism first emerged and how it impacted the natural environment is of great importance in developing a fuller historical understanding of these important developments. It is somewhat surprising that in Mongolia, a place now known and celebrated for its pastoral traditions, so little is known about the origins of pastoralism (See Section 3.1.2).

The Darkhad Depression does not contain the largest, most impressive ritual monuments known in Mongolia, yet khirigsuurs and Deer Stones (Late Bronze Age monuments – 1400 BCE – 700 BCE; Table 3) in this region are numerous though relatively simple and small in scale.

Large royal cemeteries from the Xiongnu empire (also sometimes called a confederation, it encompassed modern day Mongolia and the surrounding region from 200 BCE – CE 200) found in other regions are completely absent, though some royal Xiongnu tombs are found in the forest-steppe to the east of this region in southern Siberia (Brosseder and Miller 2011). While the Late Bronze Age monuments in the Darkhad Depression may be some of the earliest, it is unlikely that the region was ever the core zone of any great pastoralist or agro-pastoralist polities. The centers of such political formations are identified by the largest and most

Mongolia’s later polities including important settlements connected with the Xiongnu, the capitals of the Turkic, Uighur and Kidan empires, and Kharkhorum, the capital of the Mongol Empire. Importantly, it is in the far north of modern day Mongolia, in this perceived peripheral border region that the ebb and flow of Eurasian interaction networks might best be observed.

Monuments in the Darkhad Depression, first abundantly present in the Late Bronze Age, and then scarce in the subsequent Xiongnu era, may be a more accurate reflection of ephemeral and alternating political, social and/or economic connections that were supra-local in character. The natural environment in this northern region of Mongolia is capable of supporting either pastoral or hunting-gathering-fishing economies. In this way, the inhabitants of the Darkhad Depression may have had more flexibility than their neighbors to the south that, once adapted to the grass-land steppes using domesticated animals, would have had fewer alternative subsistence strategies available throughout the year. Situated on the periphery of the vast steppe grassland zone, the inhabitants of the Darkhad Depression may have been quite selective about when to participate in the broader inter-regional networks that came to define the late prehistoric and early historic periods of northeast Asia.

Figure 4: Key cultures/periods/sites in eastern Siberia and Mongolia

1.4 PROBLEM FOCUS: PASTORAL ADAPTATIONS IN CENTRAL AND