Sarah Pleuger

SARAH PLEUGER, then a graduate student at University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, was awarded a grant in October 2022 to aid research on “The Advent of Pastoralism and Early Multispecies Communities in Bronze Age Eastern Mongolia,” supervised by Dr. Robin Bendrey. The project focused on the Bronze Age (c. 1800 to 1100 BC) in the eastern Mongolian Gobi desert steppe, a time when the entire subsistence strategy and in consequence lifestyle and social fabric of people inhabiting the region changed from hunting and gathering towards nomadic pastoralism. Due to an increasingly mobile lifestyle we lacked habitation remains from this crucial period for a long time on the archaeological record. Instead, most data, particularly in respect to the massively transformed human-animal relationship including domestic livestock into communities for a reciprocal co-habitational life in the steppes, came from burial monuments. However, based on an extensive catalogue of not only monument sites, but also archaeological surface scatters of artifacts, we chose three sites around the region of Delgerkhaan Uul, Sukhbaatar province, with a high likelihood of yielding habitation remains. The text excavations were successful and provided us with preliminary stratigraphical data, as well as archaeological artifacts and faunal remains from at least one in situ site dating to the Bronze Age and two sites with a multiperiod record. The habitation remains provide a direct link to people who have constructed the well-known Bronze Age Ulaanzuukh monuments and have high potential for future research.