ABSTRACT
This chapter traces diachronic change in mortuary landscapes in Mongolia in relation to the major nomadic polities. The political economies of the empires and their antecedents used funerary monuments respectively to subvert, integrate, or appropriate preceding architectural narratives and symbols present in the landscape. Stone monuments are, in fact, staple features on the Mongolian landscape and are found with such frequency that in some places they outnumber the gers of modern herders. Historical Ecology emphasizes the landscape as a unit of analysis and highlights human acts and ideas as factors that shape the environment and how people experience it. Stone monuments and monumental landscapes are further useful to identify political processes in highly mobile societies, which has proven challenging for archaeologists. The paradigm’s focus on landscapes also is particularly useful in Mongolia where since the early 2,000s, the preponderance of archaeological studies have concentrated on dynamic landscapes of stone monuments.
