Climate change over the past 11,000 years has had a profound impact on semi-arid and arid rangelands worldwide, with the most severe desiccation accelerating over the last 5,000 years. Human populations which depend on these regions for their livelihood have had to adapt to these changes and learn to manage these landscapes and their food resources over the course of millennia. Archaeology is well-positioned to understand how foragers, farmers, pastoralists, and ranchers have used these dryland resources through time in sustainable or unsustainable ways. The Gobi Desert of southern Mongolia is a yet little-studied region of dryland steppe, which has had at least 40,000 years of human occupation, and a long record of dramatic environmental change. Dr. Arlene Rosen, of the University of Texas at Austin, will lead a team of Mongolian and US archaeologists, and environmental specialists to the Ikh Nart Nature Reserve in the southern Mongolian Gobi in order to study the social, economic, and environmental dynamics of human and natural systems during episodes of climate change over the past 5,000 years. The team will include Mongolian archaeologists and students whose heritage derives from a long cultural tradition of rangeland maintenance and use. The project will benefit from the exchange of information between Mongolian and US scientists about traditional herding practices, ecological knowledge, and culture histories, combined with expertise in reconstructing landscape and vegetation histories for the region. The aim is to develop a model for studying dry-land ranges of other regions as well as the Gobi.
This research will investigate how human inhabitants of the Gobi Desert took an active role in altering the desert-steppe environments either with purposeful intent or as a result of unintended consequences of their impact on vegetation and landscapes. It is commonly believed that ancient pastoralists accelerated desertification when they settled in semi-arid environments. However, preliminary evidence from geomorphology and archaeological botany suggests that the first cattle, sheep-goat pastoralist groups to use this region might have improved the sustainability of the area by inadvertently bringing in the seeds of northern steppe grasses along with their herds, thus improving the sustainability of their economic way of life. By excavating sites from these early time periods, the project will expand knowledge of the many ways in which these herder-hunters and later specialized herders were able to maintain their livelihood over the course of thousands of years of increasing climatic desiccation. The excavation of the Burgasny Enger site, in the Ikh Nart Reserve will provide elements of culture history, lifeways, and economic orientation through the analyses of artifacts, settlement structures and plant and animal remains. This will be paired with geomorphological studies of landscape change and water sources in the immediate vicinity of the site. The result will be a holistic picture and roadmap to sustainable practices in dry-land steppe regions of the world.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
