Bioarchaeological Research on Bronze and Iron Age cemeteries in a microregion in the Upper Orkhon Valley, Central Mongolia

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In the frame of the prolongation of our project we intend to complete our results that we have achieved so far. The goal of our initial project was to investigate the creation and use of the cemetery Maikhan Tolgoi and its surrounding ritual landscape with its different monument types. As a result of our project we are able to show that the cemetery and its immediate surrounding ritual landscape was used as a burial ground between the 16th/15th and 5th centuries BCE. Between the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE and during the period of the Mongol Empire in the 13th and 14th century CE only depositions of animal bones at Bronze Age burial mounds are attested. Three structures belong to the historical periods (Xiongnu period, 3rd c. BCE to 1st c. CE; Uighur period 8th/9th century CE). Our results reflect a deep radical change in the 16th/15th century BCE, which we connect to the intensification of horse riding since we detected rider’s facets at skeletons of the first period. This innovation is generally associated with changes in the 12th or 10th century BCE. We did not find any burials that date to the first half of the second Millennium BCE. There are, however, few structures in our microregion that we were not able to date or investigate.During our prolongation we intend to excavate these few structures in order to corroborate or possibly falsify the established sequence of monuments. We want to clarify whether there are earlier burials, in order to substantiate the results of a substantial cultural change in the 16th/15th centuries BCE. In order to reach this goal we want to survey the area south of our microregion, where we discovered another large cemetery of the Bronze and Early Iron Age. To establish a plan for this cemetery allows to answer our original posed question about the uniqueness of our site. Since we did not detect differences between the deceased individuals from different monument types we will now conduct aDNA-analyses. As laid out in our original application we furthermore want to analyze the animal bones. Since we have excavated mainly horse-heads we plan to examine horse teeth with respect to strontium isotopes in order to learn whether horses display similar values as the sheep or whether we have to reckon with a larger catchment area for the horses.