6533b82efe1ef96bd12923b5

RESEARCH PRODUCT

A new reading of Bronze Age funerary structures in Mongolia through the analysis of their architectural elements, arrangement and form

subject

description

The archaeological landscape of Mongolia is marked by the presence of numerous funerary monuments (khirigsuurs) and engraved stelae (deer stones), erected by nomadic populations at the end of the Bronze Age. The first observations indicate great regularity in the choice and arrangement of the architectural and iconographic elements at the time when these structures were built. This regularity suggests the existence of shared traditions and social coherence between nomadic communities in a territory covering almost twice that of France. The data available today do not provide sufficient perspective to establish social models at the level of a province, and even less so at the scale of the country. Such a study, never before carried out over the entire Mongolian territory, would require the implementation of data acquisition, analysis, and processing methods adapted to the establishment of a large corpus obtained by archaeological prospection. This would necessarily imply some reduction in terms of precision with regard to the information collected, but would also offer significant gains in terms of exhaustiveness, and therefore in statistical representativity.The solutions proposed here are inspired by many other scientific fields. They are applied to a series of monuments in two valleys in central Mongolia. The acquisition of these structures was facilitated by the production of hundreds of 3D models and orthomosaics of the sites, obtained by photogrammetry. A method for highlighting the relief of 3D models was developed in order to provide a three-dimensional reading of the symbols engraved on the stelae. From the orthomosaics, the stones composing the khirigsuurs were delineated with great precision through supervised machine learning approaches; understanding the layout of the monument was thus greatly facilitated. New systems for describing deer stones and khirigsuurs were established, and then applied in order to produce unsupervised classifications of these structures.As a result, new concepts and tools were developed. They offer great prospects for the study of deer stones and khirigsuurs on a very large scale, while remaining easily transposable to other archaeological sites and issues.