Archaeology in Western Mongolia
I spent this summer surveying and excavating stone, bronze and iron age archaeological sites in western Mongolia. I worked with a crew from Western Kentucky University as well as from others around the world, including more than a dozen Mongolian archaeologists and students. I don't think I can describe how valuable the experience was, both in terms of the history and archaeology that I learned, but also for the fact that I was cut off from the internet, from electronics, from distractions, and could really be immersed in a formative professional experience.
The capital of Ulaanbatar was hot, dirty, and sketchy. The city center wasn't too bad in a cold, post-soviet sort of way, but the rest of the city was much less safe/sanitary, and as one drove outward permanent structures turned to gers (yurts). Hanging out with the rest of the crew while in the city didn't appeal to me very much. They were all quite into going to bars, going to the black market, and going to karaoke, all activities I would sell a kidney to avoid. I spent a lot of that time reading in my room, or at the archaeology museum in the city center. There were a few really interesting places, like a monastery we visited, and the statue of Chinggis Khan.
For me, things started to look up as we left the city behind. We drove roughly 24 hours in total from Ulaanbatar to the village of Zuungkhangai, over the course of a few days. Along the way, we wound through the foothills of the Altai mountains, and visited a few other small villages. I really enjoyed seeing the landscape, and I spent a lot of the drive playing cards with the Mongolian students on the excavation team.
It was strange to see the initial volume of drinking and late night card games people played, as we settled into life at Zuungkhangai. I tried to get to bed by 8 each night, given we were waking up around 6 the next day for a day of hard labor. I found an old, rusty metal staircase, and started using the underside for climbing training each morning. The Mongolian guys all really liked it, and by the end of the trip they'd be joining me for campusing circuits most mornings.
The terrain around Zuunghkhangai wasn't too different from Colorado or Wyoming. I loved seeing all the dogs that wandered around town, except we were told not to touch any of them. Probably good advice.
Fieldwork was divided between survey and excavation. Survey got boring fast, and I stayed sane by listening to classical with my phone's speaker. Luckily, we were spaced far enough apart that I didn't bother anyone else with the music. Excavation alternated between fairly tame work when the international PhD's were in charge, and frantic/exhausting work when the Mongolians took charge. During lunch breaks the Mongols would usually wrestle, and I had the chance to try a few times. Unsurprisingly, I sucked.
If I had to pick one quality I liked in Mongolia, I would say it was the straightforwardness of the people there. They struck me as stronger, more intelligent, and more self-reliant than most people in the west.
The work consisted of four parts: Landscape archaeology surveys, excavations of burials and ceremonial horse head mounds, soil testing, and survey of modern winter campsites as comparative samples. Of these, it shouldn't come as a surprise that excavating burials was my favorite part. There was one curious burial in which a crumbling cranium was discovered posed as if the body had been buried straight upright. However, there was no body, as the preservation was so poor. Why the skull had been at that angle will remain a mystery.
This beautifully preserved burial (above) was an adult woman from around 1600 BCE. The thought that kept occurring to me while excavating her is that she was only a little bit younger than the Code of Hammurabi, and depending on the accuracy of the estimated date, she could even be older. Every few minutes I had to pause and breathe as that thought punched me in the chest.
We did a Mongolian style barbecue in the long draw valley of a mountain a few hours from Zuungkhangai. There were birds of prey circling overhead while we cooked, and a pack of wild dogs also showed up looking for something to eat. We were happy to share, there is no shortage of mutton in Mongolia.
The conditions we stored excavated remains in were sketchy, to say the least. Bones stored in buckets and cardboard boxes. Lab work done in a room with a ground floor window. Bones transported back to the capital in a bumpy, 24 hour van ride. I don't know what condition everything ended up in by the time the whole process was done, all of the remains are now locked in a giant shipping crate in Ulaanbatar, waiting their turn to head to the National Museum of Mongolia.
After the fieldwork wrapped up, we got to visit the old city of Karakorum, which was once the capital of the Mongol Empire. Now only some inner walls around a small buddhist monastery from later centuries survive. The old guy below owned the ger that I stayed in for a couple nights. I can leave you with this advice: you can always befriend a Mongol by offering them free vodka.
