Hello again! I’ve been in Mongolia for a little over two weeks now, and in the Tarvagatai Valley for exactly two weeks as of writing this – though when I’ll be able to post this is a bit of a different matter since the Internet here is essentially non-existent and the WiFi hotspot we do have is mostly reserved for uploading data that we collect in the field. As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the lab tent at camp enjoying an unexpected rest day due to a storm that blew in this morning. When it rains too hard, we aren’t able to go out to any of the sites where we have ongoing archeological projects because the roads are all dirt and the rain washes them out pretty bad. On non-rest days, though, my day looks a little something like this:
I usually wake up around 7:00 am, and depending on the temperature outside I’m either really excited to get out of my tent or completely unwilling to get out of my sleeping bag; when it’s sunny, the inside of the tent is unbearable during the day but when it’s cold, my sleeping bag is pretty much the only place where I can get or stay warm. I pack up my sleeping bag into possibly the handiest camping tool there is – a large plastic garbage bag – so that it will be protected in the event of a tent leak, which unfortunately has happened a couple of times when we had particularly bad storms. After I get my tent organized and the bags inside mostly water-proofed, I head over to our kitchen tent where Baigyla has breakfast ready for most of the camp. Unfortunately, the standard Mongolian breakfast of kash, which is a grain porridge, has milk in it, which means that I usually have oatmeal with peanut butter instead. Breakfast is usually pretty fast, and then we get the vans packed to try and make it on the road by 7:45 am.
If I’m with Emily, we head to site 308. Site 308 is one of a handful of sites in the valley where khirigsuurs, Bronze Age monuments that are found all across Mongolia, are found, and these stone pile monuments are the focus of Emily’s research. Her methods are mostly geophysical survey at this point, although later in the season they’ll be opening up test pits across the site, so my day involves a lot of measuring out twenty meter by twenty meter grids and laying out ropes that are marked every meter so that we can walk with either a gradiometer (which measures spatial variations in the earth’s magnetic field that are caused by local changes in magnetization) or the CMD (which measures magnetic conductivity and susceptibility). The data collected from these two instruments allows us to see areas of magnetic anomaly, which are often indicators of anthropogenic, or human, activity. Site 308 is beautiful – it was the first place where the orange and yellow lily flowers bloom, and because the khirigsuurs are sites of water retention, there are huge trees growing out of the center of several of them.
If I’m with Aspen, we head to site 180 along with most of the other volunteers. There are around fifteen of us here; Aspen and Emily are graduate students at Pitt and all the other volunteers are students at the National University of Mongolia, and then we have our drivers – since very few people are capable of driving on Mongolian roads – and Bagla, who cooks all of our food. Site 180 is also called tsagaan ereg, and is one of the first Mongol-Empire era pit houses that archeologists have worked at. Aspen is interested in the agricultural activities of the Mongol Empire; although it is widely understood as having been a nomadic society, agriculture was very much a part of the Mongol Empire. One of her primary sources of data is phytoliths, which are silica crystals formed by plants as they grow and which are left behind long after they die. Phytoliths can be recovered from the soil at archeological sites and can often be identified as having belonged to a particular plant species, making them invaluable for research trying to understand past foodways. Accordingly, as we excavate one five-centimeter level at a time, Aspen takes small dirt samples from throughout the pit for later analysis. At site 180, we pause for lunch around 1:00 pm, which is usually a dish of rice or noodles with meat, typically mutton, and some cooked root vegetables. Occasionally, if someone has driven out recently to one of the larger cities, we have some salad or other fresh vegetables; otherwise, it’s whatever will keep in the kitchen tent, which is usually potatoes and carrots. Site 180 has the benefit of having a river running right by it, which lets us wash all of the dust from a day of excavating and screening dirt before we head out for the day.
Aspen and I also have spent some time creating a herbarium collection, which we are using to make a macrobotanical and phytolithic reference set of plants in Mongolia with a focus on plants that have traditionally been used for medicinal purposes. We walk around various sites and collect flowers, photograph them, and press them; later this summer, I’ll be working on identifying them by species so that Aspen (and potentially other archeologists) can compare samples collected during excavation and attempt to identify what plants might have been found at one site or another and what that might indicate about the people living in those places.
Our day ends around 6:00 pm, and we make the drive back to camp. Site 180 is around a half hour away, while site 308 is around twenty minutes. Driving is always pretty bumpy, but there’s the opportunity to see a lot of wildlife; so far, my favorites have been two tiny baby cranes with their parents and a sleek silvery fox that I caught out of the corner of my eye. As the weeks go by, there are also more and more flowers; the best (in my opinion at least) are the beautiful, upside-down hanging lilies that only started blooming in the past couple days. Baigyla has dinner ready by the time we get back, which is typically another meat and starch dish, and sometimes a fresh batch of boorstog, a twisted and fried pastry that we like to eat with Nutella for dessert (or really any meal).
In the evening, there are a few different activities happening during the last hours of daylight. There’s almost always a game involving a volleyball happening outside the kitchen tent; I like the very simple one where we just try to hit the ball as many times as possible without letting it hit the ground and I’ve been trying to learn how to count in Mongolian that way. Mongolian as a language is very difficult for English speakers to learn; it’s also usually written in Cyrillic so it’s hard to even sound out words that are written down unless you know the Cyrillic alphabet already which I personally do not. Aside from volleyball, a few people are always working in the lab tent processing data from the day or labeling samples or preparing for the next day’s work. I’ll help there if I can, or sit outside and write about my day or draw something I saw in the notebook I like to keep while I travel to record anything particularly cool that I saw.
Before bed, I usually filter water before the next day so that I don’t have to wrestle with the water filter in the morning when I’m already often running late. Then, I return to my tent, set up my sleeping bag for the night, and get my pack ready for the following day. If you’re up really late, you can catch a pretty amazing view of the stars and the Milky Way, but because we’re so far north, it doesn’t get dark enough to see them until around two or three in the morning. I’m usually pretty exhausted by the time I get to the end of the day, so I usually tuck myself into my sleeping bag and fall asleep within a few minutes.
That’s the day! Days like today are much slower because of the rain – we mostly stay inside either the lab tent or the kitchen tent and spend the time catching up on work or just hanging out, playing cards, or reading. I’m almost to the end of my time in the field now, but I’m looking forward to my last week here and excited to keep working on the research that I’ve started here with Aspen when I get back!