A Possible Archaeological Case for the Taxation of Medieval Eurasian Nomads

At several locations in the Mongolian steppe, the archaeological remains of large enclosure walls have been found in association with structures and ceramics related to the Mongol and Khitan-Liao empires. These structures are probably the remains of infrastructure built to support large-scale extraction of livestock from the pastoralist population in Mongolia between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. This may be evidence of little-documented taxation policies of steppe states during this period, the scale of the production of resource surplus from the steppe, and examples of state-structured pastoralist landscapes and the state itself in the everyday experience of medieval herders.