An American researcher will spend this summer in Mongolia studying how those who inhabited the region 3000 years ago interacted with horses.
University of New Mexico undergraduate William Taylor is interested in people from the region’s ancient Deer Stone-Khirigsuur culture
An American researcher will spend this summer in Mongolia studying how those who inhabited the region 3000 years ago interacted with horses.
University of New Mexico undergraduate William Taylor is interested in people from the region’s ancient Deer Stone-Khirigsuur culture, who lived on the Mongolian steppes.
Little is known about these ancient people, named after the elaborate stone obelisks carved with images of flying deer they left behind.
It is not clear why, but people of this culture also ritually buried the heads of horses in groups around their stone monuments.
With so few clues to the culture, anthropologists have to use every means they can imagine to try to learn more.
Taylor hopes to learn if these horses were ridden, or used to pull chariots, and is seeking clues from the skulls of horses found in ritual burials.
“For the last year or so, I’ve been doing a comparative project where I examine North American feral horses on the Navajo reservation, and on the east coast, where they have a famous population called the Chincoteague ponies,” he said.
“These are horses that we know have never been ridden or subjected to the stresses of human use.”
He has compared those horses with those he knows have been put to particular use, such as farm horses, or military horses. Using a three-dimensional scanner, Taylor has sought a quantitative signal he could use to distinguish between wild horses and ridden horses.
Now, he has packed his portable 3D scanner and is traveling to Mongolia to examine horse skulls.
“There’s been some scientific debate about how these ancient horses were used,” he says. “Were they just wild horses? If they were domestic, were they riding them or just keeping them for food, or what was going on?”
He hopes comparing the scans he already has of horse skulls with those in Mongolian museums will yield some answers.
Western anthropologists have been able to travel and work in Mongolia only for the last f