ABSTRACT
An overview of scholarship on the Mongolian Empire reveals a puzzling irony. Extensive historical research exists on far-flung regions of the empire and the relationships between Mongol overlords and their imperial subjects, but less attention has been focused on the heartland of the Mongol Empire in present-day Mongolia. The paucity of direct information on local steppe communities during the time of the Mongol Empire and, in comparison, the voluminous sources of information derived from regions external to the steppe have resulted in a somewhat skewed appreciation of the Mongols and their indigenous political traditions. In historical accounts, the fall of the Khitan in 1125 and the consolidation of the Mongol state in 1206 are easily differentiated in time, but archaeologists have greater difficulty in separating these events as seen through the material record.
