Egiin Gol

Egiin Gol is a river of northern Mongolia. It runs into the Selenga and belongs to the watershed of Lake Baikal.^[1] A full-coverage survey of its lower valley showed where the Xiongnu lived and what they grew.^[2]

The survey

The survey covered a forty-kilometre stretch of the lower valley and examined 246 square kilometres of valley floor, terraces and ridges.^[2] It recorded 572 sites from the Upper Palaeolithic to the early twentieth century.^[2] The Xiongnu period was one of the best represented.^[2] The valley’s large cemetery, Burkhan Tolgoi, holds 97 burials.^[1]

The settlements

The survey found fifteen scatters of Xiongnu pottery. They range from more than four hectares to a few square metres, and seven of them cover more than a hectare.^[3] A large settlement lies at the mouth of every wide, well-watered tributary valley. The distance between neighbours is five to nine kilometres, and most of them stand on the north side of the river.^[3] They lie on low terraces close to the river, usually just below a bluff or ridge, and not on defensible or conspicuous ground.^[3] Smaller sites lie in the side valleys.^[3]

The pattern resembles that of modern herders, who camp in numbers by the river in summer and keep a few winter camps in the side valleys.^[4] The animal bones of the excavated sites point the same way. The sheep and goat bones at one excavated site include lambs about five or six months old, and lambs are born there in February and March. That site was therefore occupied at least in the middle or late summer.^[5] The larger riverside settlements were not occupied year round and were probably part of a seasonal round.^[6]

Grain

The survey dug at three of the large settlements.^[4] At perhaps the earliest of them, a charred grain of bread wheat from a hearth was dated by radiocarbon to between about 2330 and 2150 years before the present.^[7] At another site, a refuse pit held charcoal, seeds of goosefoot, two wheat grains and a barley grain, together with the bones of sheep, goats, cattle, horses and fish.^[5] The plants that settle on disturbed soil, goosefoot among them, are found at the edge of permanent settlements and farmland. They also grow back on old camp sites, and the survey notes that reoccupied camps would show the same seeds.^[6]

The valley is today the agricultural heartland of Mongolia, and one of the large sites lies on a terrace that is ploughed every year.^[8] The survey concluded that the valley’s Xiongnu did grow grain. It adds that there is far more evidence for herding than for tilling. On this preliminary evidence the economy was a mixture of farming, herding, hunting and fishing.^[9]

The enclosure

One site stands apart. It is a ditched enclosure of 110 by 185 metres on a high bluff, with a low earthen bank and a shallow ditch, and it overlooks much of the lower valley.^[10] The finds there are few. The survey reads it as a central place for short gatherings of the late Xiongnu population of the valley, and not as a settlement or a fort.^[11]

The valley in the Xiongnu period

The pottery of Egiin Gol came from clay in the valley itself.^[12] The people who made it lived in the valley before the Xiongnu appear in the Han histories, and they stayed after the name had dropped from them.^[13] The settlements and cemeteries of the valley formed part of a regional system. Its top was the group of large elite cemeteries such as Noyon Uul and Gol Mod.^[6]

References

^ a b Wright 2009, p. 375
^ a b c d Wright 2009, p. 373
^ a b c d Wright 2009, p. 376
^ a b Wright 2009, p. 377
^ a b Wright 2009, p. 381
^ a b c Wright 2009, p. 384
^ Wright 2009, p. 378
^ Wright 2009, p. 379, 384
^ Wright 2009, p. 384–385
^ Wright 2009, p. 381–382
^ Wright 2009, p. 382
^ Wright 2009, p. 378–379
^ Wright 2009, p. 385

Literature

Joshua Wright; William Honeychurch; Chunag Amartuvshin, The Xiongnu Settlements of Egiin Gol, Mongolia (2009)
Jean-Luc Houle; Lee G. Broderick, Settlement Patterns and Domestic Economy of the Xiongnu in Khanui Valley, Mongolia (2011)