Mongolia

Over the past decade, Dr. Spengler has sought collaborations with several different archaeological projects in Mongolia, though nearly all of them have failed to produce archaeobotanical data. The reason Mongolia has remained the most enigmatic region for the study of human-plant interactions in the past is due to heavy wind deflation. The lack of trees and semi-arid landscape results in a continual process of dust blowing off of central Mongolia and settling over the Loess Plains of China; this ecological process has cut much of the archaeology off of the Mongolian landscape, leaving only deer stones and stone burial mounds. A few determined archaeological projects have sought to find stratified sites that can inform scholars about the paleoeconomy of the region over time, and these excavators have dedicated years to this goal. One of the most important of these missions has been run by William Taylor of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Taylor excavated a site in western Mongolia, nestled in the foothills of the Altai, which was sufficiently protected from the wind to allow for an archaeobotanical analysis to be conducted. Dr. Spengler conducted this archaeobotanical study in 2018, identifying wild herbaceous plant seeds that likely indicate the use of herd animal dung as fuel at the site (Taylor et al. 2020).

Other scholars, recognizing the difficulty in finding archaeological sites that have secure stratigraphy in Mongolia, have sought to study paleoeconomy in this region through different methods. Dr. Shevan Wilkin and her colleagues, in collaboration with members of the Spengler Lab, studied ancient isotopic signals in collagen extracted from human bones collected from archaeological sites across Mongolia, spanning approximately 3,000 years ago to the rise of the Mongolian Empire in 1220. These isotopes were analyzed in Dr. Patrick Roberts’ lab at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. The results, astonishingly, show that ancient peoples across Mongolia relied increasingly on grains, notably millets, up to the point of the rise of the first Mongolian empire – the Xiongnu. From this period onward, diet in Mongolia continued to diversify and become more grain-focused (Wilkin et al. 2022). These results challenge the long-held narrative of a purely pastoralist empire emerging from Mongolia to conquer much of the ancient world.

Dr. Spengler initiated negotiations with the Arcadia Fund in 2018, aiming to expand the research agenda of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology into Mongolia. In 2019, a 2.5 million Euro grant was awarded to Drs. Spengler, Patraglia, and Boivon to develop the Mongolian Archaeological Project: Surveying the Steppe (MAPSS). The goal of MAPSS is to document archaeological sites across Mongolia and to build a comprehensive database for the country. The project is currently co-directed by Drs. Michael Fisher and Bayarsaikhan Jamsranjav, who have already recorded tens of thousands of archaeological features across Mongolia. The team continues to build its collaborations with the Spengler Lab, and all members are keen to find the elusive archaeobotanical data from Mongolia.