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Mongolia possesses an extraordinary wealth of archaeology. From monumental burials to Buddhist temples, from enigmatic “deer stone” monuments to Genghis Khan’s legendary capital city at Karakorum in the middle of the vast open steppe, there is an astonishing range of archaeological sites. Spread across all 21 of the nation’s provinces or aimags, an area spanning more than 1.5 million square kilometers, they bear witness to thousands of years of human history and culture. And in their diversity of settings, from the forested river valleys of the Altai Mountains to the arid sand dunes of the Gobi, they show the ingenuity our species – our determination and ability to adapt.
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Mongolian Archaeological Project Receives 2 Million Euro Arcadia Grant
A new grant to the Department of Archaeology will support the documentation of thousands of threatened sites and construct an open access database in English, Mongolian and Russian.
Archaeological sites in Mongolia face a range of threats, including climate change and looting.
With funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History is launching the Mongolian Archaeological Project: Surveying the Steppes (MAPSS).
Investigators in Mongolia and Germany will use satellite imagery and existing archival material to create a unified, open access database of Mongolian archaeology.
New research shows milk consumption in eastern Africa began before the evolution of lactase persistence
Got milk? The 1990s ad campaign highlighted the importance of milk for health and wellbeing, but when did we start drinking the milk of other animals? And how did the practice spread? A new study led by scientists from Germany and Kenya highlights the critical role of Africa in the story of dairying, showing that communities there were drinking milk by at least 6,000 years ago.
Cattle grazing in Entesekara in Kenya near the Tanzanian border A. Janzen
Tracking milk drinking in the ancient past is not straightforward. For decades, archaeologists have tried to reconstruct the practice by various indirect methods. They have looked at ancient rock art to identify scenes of animals being milked and at animal bones to reconstruct kill-off patterns that might reflect the use of animals for dairying. More recently, they even used scientific methods to detect traces of dairy f
21 Jan 2021 Share:
Looking into the past never looked so futuristic as it does today, and the Indiana Jones-style stereotype - with his muck-ridden, dirt digging, tomb raiding archeology - must make way for the lab-coated, bright spark of a scientist solving modern challenges in biodiversity conservation, food security and climate change in front of state-ot-the-art instrumentation and computers.
Indiana Jones and Lara Croft have a lot to answer for. Public perceptions of archaeology are often thoroughly outdated, and these characterisations do little to help.
Yet archaeology as practiced today bears virtually no resemblance to the tomb raiding portrayed in movies and video games. Indeed, it bears little resemblance to even more scholarly depictions of the discipline in the entertainment sphere.