FOR 5438:  Urban impacts on the Mongolian Plateau – Entanglements of Economy, City, and Environment

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Agriculture, Forestry and Veterinary Medicine ; Geosciences
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468897144

The episodic character of urbanism on the Mongolian plateau provides us with the ideal opportunity to investigate the impacts cities had on the local environment and study diachronic changes. There are only two Mongol period cities on the vast eastern steppes: Karakorum – the capital of the united Mongol empire – and Khar Khul Khaany Balgas. Both are built from scratch and epitomize the dramatic transformation from a pastoral economy to an urban landscape. Both sites and their settlement network remain nearly untouched by modern urbanization and farming activities. With our focus on energy/fuel, food, building materials – together with the kilns necessary for their production –, and iron production including furnaces, we investigate energy-intensive material flows with the strongest impact on the environment. Another advantage of the proposed scheme is our two-fold comparative approach: Not only do we compare two cities in two different valleys, but also, we will work in a diachronic perspective (during Phase II). To achieve our objectives and verify these hypotheses, we will use a multi-proxy approach combining innovative methods from a wide set of disciplines: archaeology, archaeozoology, physical anthropology, bioarchaeology, soil science, palaeoecology, palaeoclimatology, remote sensing, and geophysics. A major methodological strength of our network is that individual aspects are investigated by different disciplines, each with their own source material. The same question will be focused on through multiple lenses, which allows for complementary insights but also the mutual control of achieved results and their interpretations. Together we will get to the bottom of the entangled relationships of urbanism, economic practices, and the environment. To systemize our interdisciplinary research agenda, we will use urban metabolism as a conceptual framework and will integrate life cycle assessment into this concept in order to follow the goods from physical extraction to final consumption and discard. This research design using a variety of proxies to evaluate the often simultaneous and intersecting, therefore entangled processes, has not yet been undertaken within this world region and will set new standards within and beyond our disciplines. For effective, thematically focused collaboration, we are setting up four key areas: A) Settlement system, B) Utilization of non-food resources, C) Provisioning the city, D) Environmental conditions. These areas systemize the identified crucial topics to elucidate the entanglements of economy, city, and environment.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Mongolia

Projects

• Animal use, husbandry, and herd management in the Mongol Empire (Applicant Peters, Joris )
• Bioarchaeological studies on lifeways, diet and health of the people in the Mongol Empire (Applicant Toso, Ph.D., Alice )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Bemmann, Jan )
• Geochemical fingerprints of land use and fire regimes in the central Mongolian steppe (Applicants Amelung, Wulf ;  Mörchen, Ramona )
• Households and demography at the time of the Mongol Empire – Comparing two valleys of Central Mongolia (Applicant Reichert, Susanne )
• Large-area magnetic mapping and source reconstruction applying a novel multichannel optical magnetometer instrument (Applicant Linzen, Sven )
• Palaeoecology and Palaeoclimatology of the Mongolian Plateau and their impact on urbanism (Applicant Litt, Thomas )
• Settlement system and economic practices in the Orkhon Valley during the Mongol Empire (Applicant Bemmann, Jan )
• Virtual Landscape and Multispectral Survey (Applicant Lang, Ph.D., Matthias )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Jan Bemmann