Mobile livestock farming is still of great importance in Mongolia today, looking back on a long history marked by a special relationship between humans and farm animals. Sarah Pleuger, a doctoral fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, is focusing her research on this relationship from the Early Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Doing so, she makes use of stable isotope analysis methods, but is also aware of the special nature of working with scientists on site. We asked the archaeologist for an interview and asked her about how the interactions between humans and animals have changed over time and how the relationship was characterized in the Bronze Age in the first place.
"Society in Mongolia is subject to constant change"
L.I.S.A.: Ms Pleuger, in a doctoral project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, you are looking at livestock farming in eastern Mongolia during the Bronze and Iron Age through a zooarchaeological perspective. Before we come to your project: What was the significance of livestock farming in eastern Mongolia? Why is it worthwhile to take a scientific look at it?
Pleuger: Mobile livestock farming is still very important in Mongolia today and has developed over thousands of years into a complex and multispecialised way of keeping animals and living with them in a common social sphere. Often, this way of life was and is often portrayed in a romanticised and sensationalised way, in both public media and academia - nomads in traditional gowns moving in caravans with their herds in the vast steppe or the Gobi desert. In recent decades, this was also used for tourist purposes and marketing, but is not representative of the reality of pastoral nomadism. The term "nomad" and the romanticising of Mongolian pastoralist lifeways was shaped ethnologically and anthropologically, in a time when colonialism was still influencing many "western" branches of research. For a long time this was based on a linear model of human development and almost inevitably from a mobile life to sedentism and finally to urbanisation. It was mainly a matter of othering "nomadic" groups from sedentary civilisations. In my opinion, this approach and treatment of nomadic groups has no place in research today. What is much more interesting is that we look at a region here in which a very special relationship between humans and domestic animals has developed over thousands of years and still exists today in rural areas. The close coexistence of humans and animals, dependent on each other in the extreme climatic conditions of the Mongolian Gobi Desert, has developed into a social construct here. In the countryside of eastern Mongolia, where our international team works, we meet families every year who spend the summer in the region with their herds in yurts (gers), 2-3 hours by car from the nearest small town. These families have been keeping the five most common grazing animal species (tavan chošuu mal) here for generations: sheep, goats, cattle (incl. yaks), which have a very close relationship with people, both spatially and socially, as well as horses and camels, which tend to graze at great distances away from the family. Mobility and incomes of the families are often very diverse; no one calls themselves a "nomad" there. Society in Mongolia is subject to constant change and development, just like everywhere else in the world. In my view, the task of archaeology is not the artificial preservation of traditional ways of life, but the protection of their significance in the present through the reappraisal and preservation of past realities. The examination of livestock herding in eastern Mongolia is worthwhile in my eyes above all because it is a very unique way of respecting other living beings, domestic animals, and understanding them as part of society rather than as objects has developed here. These perspectives, as well as the rich history of the Mongolian cultural tradition as a part of a diverse and colourful palette of human history, must not be forgotten.