Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58 (05) 67-9
             
A Possible Archaeological Case of the Taxation of Medieval Eurasian Nomads 

Joshua Wright
Oberlin College
jwright@oberlin.edu

Abstract
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 statestructured pastoralist landscapes and the state itself in the everyday experience of medieval herders

Keywords
Mongol Empire – Khitan-Liao Empire – pastoralists – taxation – archaeology

* I want to acknowledge my colleagues William Honeychurch and Chunag Amartuvshin for making our fieldwork in Mongolia possible, and Colin Renfrew, Marisa Marthari, and Michael Boyd for inviting me to participate in and allowing me to include results from the Keros Survey. I also want to thank Naomi Standen, Daniel Rogers, and Emily Hammer for their help and guidance and four anonymous reviewers at JESHO for their advice and detailed and insightful comments on drafts of this paper, especially for pointing out sources that have added depth and breadth to this work. Any errors are, of course, my own.

Introduction
It has long been argued that societies rooted in mobile pastoralism lacked the ability to build up and maintain a steady surplus of staples on the scale necessary to sustain large states (Di Cosmo 1999), but the existence of states and empires on the Eurasian steppe suggests that this was not the case (Honeychurch 2012, 2013, 2014; Rogers 2012). Surplus production has long been considered an essential element in the development and maintenance of complex societies (Childe 1950; Earle 1987; Wright and Johnson 1975), where it provides the means to support all manner of specialized labor and resources. Though direct evidence of administrative action is rarely recovered archaeologically (Wright, Miller, and Redding 1980), the infrastructure involved in the production, management, storage, and distribution of surplus is relatively easy to detect in immobile, agriculturally-based states.
Archaeological traces of administrative infrastructure are rarely discovered in regions where mobile pastoralism dominated the economy. The focus of this paper is one such case, where some archaeological evidence of administrative management in the economic lives of ordinary pastoralists has been recognized. Here I offer an interpretation of several large enclosure walls of a type that has been previously reported anecdotally in Mongolia but that are rarely documented and published. By comparing them with similar large-scale pastoral-management features in Greece, I argue that these enclosures are of a scale and in locations that suggest that they are the remains of infrastructure built to support large-scale extraction of livestock from a pastoralist population in Mongolia during the ninth-fourteenth centuries CE, the period of the Khitan and Mongol empires. These structures also fit the seasonal round of pastoral nomads and their animals in a way that suggests their use during periods when a herd census would have produced high and detailed counts.
The archaeological remains of the middle range of administration in the Eurasia steppe are rare. Capitals and imperial projects are obvious, and the many examples of common habitation sites make the ordinary nomad archaeologically visible. The interface between these two, however, combines the rarity of city sites with the low profile of the common habitations to make these critical points of connection between a polity and its people almost invisible archaeologically.
The examples discussed here are not radically different from the remains of farming infrastructure, in that they are built structures. Building permanent structures is not anomalous in nomad-dominated regions of Eurasia. There is a long tradition of communal labor and the creation of built environments in the steppe through the construction of stone monuments (Evans and Humphrey 2003; Frohlich et al. 2009; Grigoriev and Menshenin 2012; Honeychurch, Wright, and Amartuvshin 2009; Houle 2009, Purzycki 2013; Wright 2007, 2014).
The archaeologically enduring infrastructure of nomadic pastoralism is typically related to animal management. The building of sheltering walls, reusable foundations for temporary structures or complete corrals, development of water sources for humans and animals, and preparation of the ground for the construction of temporary dwellings are common infrastructure investments made by mobile pastoralists across Eurasia (Chang and Koster 1986; Aldred 2013; Cribb 1991; Makarewicz 2014; Hammer 2014). The remains of most of these sites are subtle and difficult to detect and interpret archaeologically, but there is a class of structures in the Mongolian steppe that are larger than almost all other archaeological remains there, apart from cities and imperial border fortifications. These can be interpreted as enclosure walls built to facilitate the extraction of pastoral products on a large scale and as structures associated with systems of the administration of nomadic pastoralism by states or locally powerful leaders during the period of major steppe-based empires (c. 900-1300 CE).
The building of enclosure walls goes back at least to the late Iron Age in the Mongolian steppe, when the Xiongnu (c. 300 BCE-300 CE) built enclosures as elite centers and as settlements (Davydova 1968; Wright, Honeychurch, and Amartuvshin 2009; Danilov 2011; Honeychurch 2012). Imperial managers of the Khitan and Mongol empires built walled and fortified cities and palace sites in many places across the eastern Eurasian steppe, using both rammed earth and stone for walls (Perlee 1962; Rogers, Ulambayar, and Gallon 2005; Rogers 2012), but these structures are not very similar to the enclosures being discussed here.
More comparable are large enclosures found around the eighth-ninthcentury CE Uyghur city of Kharbalgas, in the middle Orkhan valley, which have been interpreted as both residential compounds and animal pens (J. Bemmann, pers. comm.; Grützner et al. 2012). Also notable are the hunting enclosures built by Mongol khans. An example built during Ogedei’s reign is described thus:
[H]e had ordered a wall built. It was a two-day journey long and was made of wood and clay, and it had gates. . . . When a hunt was held, soldiers in all directions would be informed, and they would form a circle and head for the wall, driving the prey toward it. (Fazlullah 1999: 329)
The wood-and-clay construction of this temporary wall is reminiscent of the traces found at Delgerkhaan Uul (see below). The various enclosures discussed in this paper are not “a two-day journey long,” but the use of those enclosures for the smaller-scale slaughter of wild animals cannot be completely discounted, although their particular locations make it unlikely.
Apart from the two areas being discussed here, none of the other areas of Mongolia that have been systematically surveyed by archaeologists is known to have contained large enclosures. These include the tracts in the vicinity of the Oyu Tolgoi mine in the South Gobi (Gunchinsuren, Altschul, and Olsen 2011), the Lower Egiin Gol valley (Turbat, Amartuvshin, and Erdenbat 2003; Honeychurch and Amartuvshin 2006; Wright, Honeychurch, and Chunag, forthcoming), portions of the Khanuy valley in the northeastern Khangai highlands (Houle and Erdenebaatar 2009; Houle and Broderick 2011), and areas in Hovsgol Aimag (Frohlich et al. 2009). These surveys, along with the two being discussed here, form a sampled transect across Mongolia from the forest steppe of the north to the arid South Gobi, and enclosures are found only in a distinct environmental belt not too arid and not too distant from core political or populated regions.
This paper is part of an ongoing scholarly critique of the view of mobile steppe societies as unstructured and freewheeling entities where complex political organization is either a mirror of immobile societies or an emergent phenomenon that grows from local and immediate conditions and just as quickly collapses back into chaos (see Di Cosmo 2002; Honeychurch 2012; Honeychurch and Amartuvshin 2006; Rogers 2012; Sneath 2007). When approaching historically complex steppe-based polities, however, there is an often-lamented lack of primary documentation of administrative structures (Rogers 2012; Drompp 1999: 390; Natsagdorj 1967). This is especially true of the heartland areas of these states in the Mongolian steppe. While the more literate peripheral areas document their interactions with the state in detail (Allsen 1987), core areas may be obscure regions, with only the most basic information recorded (Shurmann 1956; Smith 1970; Atwood 2012). This lack of documentation can create the appearance of a lack of administrative control, but it may be simply one type of administrative structure (document-rich and immobile) contrasted with another (generally mobile and sustained through long-standing traditions of interaction). It is here that archaeology can provide information on the interactions of the inhabitants of the steppe with the empires and states in which they lived (cf. Atwood 2012: 38-39).
Honeychurch (2014: 36) writes that the basic organizational challenges that face states arising in mobile societies—large-scale integration and the management of asymmetric social relations—are the same as the major concerns of immobile states, although the political innovators of these polities were pressed to develop novel local schemes for dealing with these challenges (Sneath 2007; Rogers 2012). This paper is an archaeological case-study of some possible solutions. Many complex polities collect, manage, and use surplus production. This example is of one such case associated with states with large mobile populations and an illustration of historic Eurasian mobile pastoralism in one of its many forms (cf. Humphrey and Sneath 1999).

1 Medieval States and Empires in the Eastern Steppe

The Mongol Empire (1206-1370 CE), the best known of the medieval states of the eastern steppe, was preceded by the Khitan-Liao (907-1125 CE) and Uyghur (744-848 CE) empires, which controlled the Mongolian heartland during their respective periods of prominence. These three states had common problems in their administration of pastoralist resources and providing for their cities and imperial courts. Historically, scholars have described this as a complex period of rising and falling empires, clashing tribal confederations, particular ethnicities, traditions and power structures that outlasted empires, diplomacy, and government policies (Allsen 1987; Barfield 1989; Christian 1998; Mackerras 1973; Morgan 2007; Rogers 2012; Atwood 2012; Sneath 2007; Sinor 2000; Sinor and Klyashtorny 1996; Standen 2003; Twitchett and Tietze 1994; DurandGuedy 2013).
The Mongol Empire and its predecessors have left an archaeological record on the steppe, the study of which is dominated by urban and palatial centers (Kradin and Ivliev 2008; Perlee 1962; Rogers, Ulambayar, and Gallon 2005; Roth et al. 2002; Bemmann et al. 2010; Shiraishi 2002; Gaubatz and Stevens 2006). These sites provide an archaeologically clear diagnostic ceramic signature for the period and evidence of the scale of investment in the central places of these empires.
Although the deeply textured elite history does occasionally reach out of the palaces and centers and into the grasslands (Oka 2009; Atwood 2012; Bold 2001), the nature of common archaeological remains and their contexts makes it difficult to connect archaeological sites with specific polities. The most common material from these periods is a hard-fired grey-ware pottery of various forms that is found across much of this chronological range and region. The surfaces of these vessels were decorated with several types of distinctive incised, rouletted, or punctate designs (Perlee 1962; Jilin 1991; Fairservis 1993; Makino 2007; Kradin and Ivliev 2008). Similar material can be found in the steppe cities of the Khitan Empire (Kradin and Ivliev 2008), the river valleys of the Chifeng region of Inner Mongolia (Chifeng 2011), the later Mongol capital of Karakorum (Bemmann et al. 2010; Roth et al. 2002), and the steppe-desert of the Gobi, far from any towns (Makino 2007; Wright, Honeychurch, and Amartuvshin 2007) (fig. 1). 

 Figure 1
A range of Khitan-Liao-Mongol grey-ware pottery recovered by archaeological surveys. This group shows the typical characteristics and the range of variation to be expected in these assemblages: 1.a. sherds found at Baga Gazaryn Chuluu; 1.b. at Delgerkhaan Uul, 400 km to the east; and 1.c. in the Shar Mörön watershed, 650 km southeast of that. Photos: Baga Gazaryn Chuluu Project, Dornod Mongol Survey Project, and Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project (CICARP).

Furthermore, between the first appearance of this ceramic technology in northeastern Asia during the late first millennium CE to its fading out with the failure of its production and distribution system and the advent of the widespread use of glazed wares in the fourteenth century CE, it is not yet possible to differentiate most assemblages within this time range. This situation may be remedied by future detailed studies that distinguish regional or chronological patterns, but only one such study has so far been made (Makino 2007).
Although this wide regional ceramic profile suggests an enticing alternative history of the technology of medieval northeastern Eurasia, it also limits the archaeological understanding of chronology to much longer time segments than those of the historically known political units. Although elite glazed pottery is easy to differentiate between those historical periods (Kessler 1994; Roth et al. 2002; Lin 2012), without specific chronological indicators in a surface archaeological assemblage, such as coins or glazed ceramics, diagnostic sherds of grey ware are datable only to a period that spans the Khitan and Mongol empires. At Baga Gazaryn Chuluu (figure 2), for example, there are 520 glazed ceramic sherds out of 12,245 sherds (4.2% of the total) of this period recorded by the Baga Gazaryn Chuluu project, of which 83 (0.7%) are not brownish-black-glazed storage jars and wine bottles of a style produced regularly between the Medieval period and the modern day. Of those, most are whiteor cream-glazed wares that could be Khitan period and are concentrated at three sites, all far from the features being discussed here. As a result of this ceramic dating situation, the analysis offered here is limited to a general picture of the management of steppe pastoralists in the ninth-fourteenth centuries and is not a study of how Mongol policies might have differed from Khitan ones.
Turning to the regulations under which surplus was extracted from steppe pastoralists by various medieval states, we find that Mongol imperial tax practices were, as a whole, a disordered and shifting system that drew together conquered regions, various reforms and policy changes, and novel inventions (Allsen 1987; Shurmann 1956; Smith 1970). In the steppe heartland, taxes were most often a simple levy known as the qubchiri, paid in livestock. This form of extraction predated the Mongol Empire and was practiced by other states managing steppe nomads (Shurmann 1956). This specific situation parallels the resolution of the available archaeological data, among which the most widespread archaeological markers in this period span several historically documented periods and polities. For these reasons, I will conflate general policies and periods and work on the assumption that there were generally similar long-term traditions of taxes or other exactions that spanned the archaeologically visible Khitan-Mongol period.
Mongol imperial officials were mandated to collect both animals on the hoof and secondary products from communities of herders. This tax of live animals was set at one percent of the animals in a herd, rising to ten percent during some periods. (Allsen 1987; Shurmann 1956; Smith 1970; Vernadsky 1938). Even the highest recorded rate of extraction (10% of a herd) would be a tolerable, infrequent expense for most herders, whose well-managed herds can grow faster than that; the herders would be able to sustain the levy with unproductive male animals alone.

Over the long term, collecting animals on the hoof simply changes one group of herders for another, once a tax in animals is levied the animals must be tended by the tax collectors and brought to graze in some other area. These requirements discourage the building up of long term government controlled herds because the necessary labor and infrastructure would consume animals and duplicate the already existing herding system. The rapid consumption or redistribution of animals removes the need for officials to look after animals for long periods. The documented Mongol period levy—mare’s milk and living animals—was focused on short-term consumption by officials or armies and for ritual, welfare, and relief aid (Rogers 2012; see also cases in Cleaves 1982, Tekin 1969, and Atwood 2012). Pastoralist products that could be stored over the longer term include wool, dried cheese, and butter, although there is no reference to this as part of tax practice in the Mongol period or before. The Mongol or Khitan-Liao tax on ready-to-consume pastoral production was customarily occasional, gathered for special events, to support passing officials, and to provide war supplies, but—as the Mongol Empire, courts, governments, and cities grew larger—later khans made taxes more regular and more complex (Allsen 1987).

2 Material Records of the Administration of Pastoralism

Recent and continuing archaeological fieldwork in Mongolia has provided probable evidence for the infrastructure used as part of the extractive provisioning and taxation systems of the Mongol and Khitan polities. The evidence for this is primarily a built infrastructure of large enclosure walls. In order to make the argument that this is the infrastructure for the extraction of surplus from mobile pastoralists in the Mongolian steppe during the Middle Ages, let us first consider an example of such infrastructure in a more contained and well-documented setting. There is an example of a system of large-scale extractive pastoralism with distant administrators on the island of Keros, in the Cyclades islands of Greece. Here we find archaeological remains that parallel some of those found in Mongolia. This small island has been, for most of the last thousand years, used primarily by goat-herding pastoralists and managed from afar. Keros has recently been completely surveyed (Renfrew et al., forthcoming), and a range of historical pastoralist infrastructure has been recorded, including the multi-layered remains of various historical herding systems (cf. Chang 1994). The primary components of these are corrals attached to the ruins of small holdings, excavated water pools of less than 10 meters in circumference, division walls that span the island, and large corrals. In living memory and recent history, a system of small-holder pastoralism dominated the island. Single households produced secondary products, mainly cheese, and sold surplus animals (G. Gavalas, pers. comm. 2013). The small corrals from this recent period are frequently in places with limited access to the coast and other areas of the island, a land-use strategy that favors small managed herds and household-level secondary-product production.
On Keros, there are also the remains of a different system of pastoralism, in which large herds were managed over larger areas. Historically, the island’s pastoralists were administered by a monastery on the nearby large island of Amorgos. We do not know the exact nature of the animal products extracted from Keros, but the larger, more ruinous, and older corrals can be interpreted as the remains of a system of direct census and of the extraction of animals on the hoof, rather than of their secondary products (Chang 1994; for a contrasting situation, see Kondyli 2010).

 Figure 2 Map showing Mongolia and its surrounding regions and the two areas discussed in the text. They are located in the desert-steppe of the North Gobi, equidistant from the centers of the Mongol and Khitan empires in the eastern Khangai highlands and the Shar Mörön river basin, respectively.

 These larger enclosures (0.1-1.2 hectares) are several times larger and their walls originally lower than those of the small corrals (0.02-0.06 ha.), suggesting that they would have had to be topped with thorny brush to contain animals and could not have been used for a long period. They are also mostly situated in the saddles of passes and mid-slope areas that balance the effort of accessing high ground (where goats would probably be during a roundup) and the island’s coast. The size and the location of the large corrals suggest a roundup system in which large herds of goats were gathered from the surrounding rough, high ground and then sorted, before being moved down to boats. For these reasons the surviving herding infrastructure can be seen to have supported the extraction of large numbers of animals on the hoof. These animals can be examined and sorted by relatively small groups of herders using large corrals to contain them for short periods before selecting some and sending them to the the administrative center or to market.
Two aspects are key to the comparison being drawn here—first, the topographic positions of the large corrals balance the habits of animals, the labor of the herders, and the advantage of administrators; and second, the scale of the administration.
 
 Figure 3
Two examples of the wall fabrics of large enclosures: 3.a. shows the leaning-slab technique at Delgerkhaan Uul, and 3.b. drystone wall in Baga Gazaryn Chuluu. The collapsed wall is visible here as an alignment of stones smaller than the surrounding bedrock slabs and perpendicular to them (photos: DMS and BGC projects, respectively).
enclosure structures, which far exceeds the needs of a single herding household and, combined with the location, provides a suggested archaeological signature of large-scale herd 

3 Examples from the Gobi Region of Mongolia

In the Gobi region of Mongolia, recent archaeological surveys in two areas, Baga Gazaryn Chuluu, in Dundgovi Aimag (Amartuvshin and Honeychurch 2010; Wright and Amartuvshin 2009; Wright, Honeychurch, and Amartuvshin 2007), and Delgerkhaan Uul, in Sukhbaatar Aimag (fig. 2) have documented what might be the administrative infrastructure for animal census and taxation in the heartland of the Khitan and Mongol empires. Both of these study areas are “islands” in the desert-steppe that stand out topographically, geologically, and hydrologically from the surrounding homogeneous terrain and are ecological and archaeological hot spots. They have been centers of inhabitation and key points in political and symbolic landscapes as long as humans have been active on the steppe.
In both of these areas, there are large enclosures that consist of collapsed or roughly constructed walls (fig. 3) and architectural evidence for administrative control during the ceramically defined Khitan-Mongol period (see above). At Baga Gazaryn Chuluu there is a clear relationship between large and small corrals and their elevation that informs interpretations of the use of the large enclosures. Together, these suggest that the larger enclosures in both areas are remnants of corrals used for the collection of animals by or for agents of the state.
These enclosures are so large that they cannot be considered to have had any day-to-day use for single herding groups. The typical campsite area of modern Mongolian pastoralists, including residential space, work areas, and various animal pens and bedding areas, does not exceed four hectares (Umekazu et al. 2010; Wright, forthcoming); these enclosures are many times that size. Furthermore, most herd-management tasks (e.g., sorting animals and bringing mares in for milking) are done today on unfenced flat ground. At the other end of the scale, another possible use for these enclosures is the preservation of summer graze for winter pasture; in this case, these enclosures would be too small. Typically, whole meadows or valleys are set aside in this way, and offer enough grass to sustain a herding group for the season.
A key issue in the interpretation of these structures is their dating: we can date these features with accuracy but not with the precision of an excavated archaeological context. The logic of the chronological model used goes like this: In an excavated archaeological deposit, the question “is this deposit sealed and single-period, or mixed” is relatively easily answered. In surface archaeology, the worst-case scenario for excavations—unsealed and mixed—is the usual situation. In this case, evidence must be weighed and a decision made on the nature of the surface archaeological deposit. The ideal situation would be independent dating evidence (a coin, inscription, or radiometric date) from a secure surface context associated with a single type of surface material. The non-invasive nature of surface archaeology and the extent and volume of material recorded by most archaeological surveys makes this a rare situation. Instead, we date surface features through their similarity to known dated types or through a web of interlinked spatial associations. The first is commonly used for small objects such as ceramics and the most common structures, such as burial monuments. This method is the typically used for dating surface archaeology and is used here to secure the ceramic identifications on sites associated with these large features. The second method, spatial association, can be broken down into two situations. The first is proximity, where one dated locale that is close to an undated one raises the question, “why is that not also from the same time?” The second situation, in which one looks at how the unknown material fits into a pattern of known sites and types, answers this question. In sum, what pattern of association, exclusion, or types do we see for this period or others and how does this particular example fit that, or not? The analogy of a crossword puzzle is appropriate here: an unknown answer can be deduced and then reinforced by the strength of the other answers that cross it. Because the sites discussed here are so large and of a type not typically reported or dated, it is primarily through these interlinked associations of typologically dated sites and undated features that the chronological conclusions used here are established.

At Delgerkhaan Uul, a region not yet fully surveyed by archaeologists, there are examples of groups of platforms and structures associated with the use of this territory by imperial agents or the court itself (fig. 4). Although these platforms are large, about 30 meters square, they show little evidence of intensive use after their construction and may have been mainly elements of a political landscape, demonstrating the authority of the rulers rather than actually housing them. Flanking the valley in which one of the two identified complexes is located is a pair of large enclosures (66 and c. 90 ha., respectively), one consisting primarily of leaned stone slabs and the other a mix of those and possibly rammed earth (fig. 5). Neither is tall and or would have contained animals for any length of time without augmentation by a perishable upper portion or constant attention by several herders. They would serve only to contain a large number of animals for a short time or to reserve an area of graze for official use.
The logic used to date these enclosures is as follows: There are three major chronological periods represented in the larger areas around them. The first is the Bronze Age (1500-700 BCE), represented by nearby rock-art locales and stray finds of stone tools and ceramics, and the second is the Xiongnu period (c. 300 BCE-300 CE), evidenced by a multi-burial cemetery contained in the northern enclosure and third platforms from the Khitan or later period nearby. The enclosure might be associated with any of these periods or another one altogether. It is far larger and better preserved than anything known from the Bronze Age in the Gobi, so that early date is extremely unlikely. The real question is, is it Xiongnu? The Xiongnu built various ditched enclosures and structures and walled settlements (Davydova 1968; Danilov 2011), but none of those enclosures contains burials and none of the dozens of known Xiongnu cemeteries in Mongolia has enclosure walls around them. For these reasons, either the medieval platforms are the most likely associated features or this enclosure belongs to a fourth period without other associated sites. Here, geomorphology and wall form come into play. First, the structure of the enclosure resembles other smaller medieval constructions that are dated by associated ceramics (Wright, Honeychurch, and Amartuvshin 2007). 

 Figure 4 A platform with architectural remains at Delgerkhaan Uul. The plan view also shows a pair of nearby modern winter corrals that were built using stone from the platform and an active pastoralist campsite to their west. Photo: DMS Project; satellite image: Google Earth © 2014 DigitalGlobe.

Second, although some mud or rammed-earth superstructure has decayed, leaving a mound of gravelly soil in some sections of the course of the enclosure wall, the stones of the feature are mostly not covered by soil. They are covered only where natural outwash areas cross the enclosure. In these areas, enough soil has accumulated to bury the remaining stones only partially. Comparison of the depth of this sediment build up with partially buried grave features of known types in the area suggests this is a process taking several centuries, not millennia. All of these lines of less-than-ideal chronological evidence thus combine to a make a strong case for a medieval date for the Delgerkhaan Uul enclosures.
While Delgerkhaan Uul offers a clear possibility of direct official control, Baga Gazaryn Chuluu has a related set of archaeological remains that are another step removed from official presence but also potentially illustrative of administrative influence over pastoral production and taxation. Here, there are

no remains easily interpretable as elements of the imperial political landscape; instead, the medieval and post-medieval herding landscape is dominated by small corrals (c. 0.01-0.03 hectares) (fig. 6) (Wright, forthcoming). These sheltered areas would have provided winter protection for the animals of a single herding group and a place for herders to work and store equipment and consumables for the winter and early spring. The stone walls and foundations of these places demonstrate infrastructure investment and the building of what

 Figure 5
The enclosures at Delgerkhaan Uul. They can be seen on either side of an area of low ground containing a set of three platforms. The southwestern enclosure fell only partially in the initial survey area and so was not fully mapped. Unenclosed portions of the northeastern enclosure use a natural wall of outcropping rock to complete the enclosure.

 Figure 6 A small corral at Baga Gazaryn Chuluu. The corral is built in a style similar to the enclosure walls. The footing of a gir (secondary corral) is visible to the right of the main corral. This location has been used irregularly as a campsite and animal holding area since the Türk period (photo: BGC Project).

Hammer (2014: 1) has described as landscape anchors, “geographic foci that [structure] the spatial organization of local landscapes” by local pastoralists.
Although this corralling pattern continues to be used today, ceramics found at many of these sites and some examples of a leaned-slab construction style associate most of these corrals with medieval and early historical times. In 140 km2 of intensive survey in the rocky hinterland of Baga Gazaryn Chuluu, 159 corral sites were recorded, of which nine showed evidence of recent use (in about the last decade) and 14 contained carved Buddhist blessings associated with late-nineteenth of early-twentieth-century monasteries in the area. Interviews with local herders established their preference for returning to their usual winter corral-sites year after year and moving them only every one or two generations (see also Natsagdorj 1967: 280). The 22 corral areas with associated datable ceramics show an increase in the number of corrals active during the tenth-fourteenth centuries, with 15 sites active as compared to five in the
 
 Figure 7
A map of Baga Gazaryn Chuluu showing elevation (in darkening shades of grey), the locations of corral sites, and the course of the large enclosure wall on the high ridges. The large number of corral sites in the southeastern quadrant is probably due to the better winter protection and easy access offered by the many small ridges and valleys there.

period of the less centralized Türk Khaganates and the Uyghur Empire that preceded Khitan control of the region (seventh-tenth centuries) and seven in the fifteenth-nineteenth centuries. This suggests more small-scale herding groups active in the area during this period of imperial administration and potentially intensified demands by the state.
Baga Gazaryn Chuluu also contains an enclosure. Given the intensification of smaller-scale herding in the area, this to could be related to administration of pastoral production (fig. 7). This wall encloses about 50 hectares of high sloped ground and is, in places, substantial enough to act like a terrace, retaining soil on the rocky slopes. It is built mostly of leaning slabs and drystone walling incorporating natural rock outcrops. This wall might be another example of a large corral related to the management of goats,1 (1  Today, herders’ choices about herd composition are affected both by the market for animals and their secondary products and also by the grazing environment that is available. In both of these regions today goats, which flourish in rocky and scrubby terrain and produce milk and cashmere, are a large portion of the herds in both areas Bold (2001:5) notes that sheep and goats were grouped together as ‘sheep’ in historical records. Goats are thus invisible in textual record, although they are visible in the archaeological record (Nomokonova et al. 2010; Makarewicz 2011; Martin 2011); there is no doubt that they were present in the past.)  as there are no other domestic animals that could flourish on the high ridges it encircles. The enclosed area is relatively well vegetated throughout the year, particularly in late spring and summer, when it could sustain more animals than would surrounding areas. This might have made it a useful enclosure for a summer census of animals or for use as a holding area for animals brought from surrounding regions during the summer.
The dating of the Baga Gazaryn Chuluu enclosure hinges on the dating of corral remains and sherds scatters on the rock ridges of Baga Gazaryn Chuluu. No archaeological material was found in the enclosure, and few sites are found at elevations above 1600 meters anywhere in Baga Gazaryn Chuluu. All datable sites in the 3.7 km2 that make up the southwestern ridge of the rocks where the enclosure is located date to the medieval period. Specifically, five of the ten corral sites or sherd scatters without architecture on this ridge date to this period; the rest are undatable. There is one exception to this, a site that contains archaeological material from the Khitan period as well as from the preceding Türk period and the succeeding post-Mongol Empire period. This place must have been a choice locale for habitation, and, unlike most of the upland sites, it offers robust shelter in winter. The exposed position of the other higher sites suggests that they were used in moderate seasons. The enclosure is clearly associated spatially with material of the Khitan-Mongol period. What other options are there? The most common archaeological material at Baga Gazaryn Chuluu, after the Khitan-Mongol period, is the Türk (seventh-tenth centuries CE) and the Buddhist period (eighteenth-twentieth centuries CE). The Türks seem to have been enthusiastic builders of large features on the landscape, but their general pattern of land-use avoided the high rocks. They built valley-spanning alignments of individual stones and smaller stone features At Baga Gazaryn Chuluu they may have been responsible for large alignments of stone built ring structures that circle a low rocky ridges in several places. There are, however, no settlements, rock art, tombs, or major features of the Türk periods in the high rocks. The Buddhists of Baga Gazaryn Chuluu built several shrines and monasteries and decorated corral sites with Buddhist symbols and inscriptions. No such symbols were found at any of the high-elevation corrals. Finally, there is likewise no evidence for dating this enclosure to the Bronze Age.

4 Discussion

Clear comparisons can be drawn between the Mongolian examples and the corrals from the island of Keros, although the scale of the ecclesiastical island system is much smaller than that of the Eurasian imperial examples. We see different scales of pastoralist economy—smaller corrals for household use and much larger corrals for official use, and we see the same intersection of aspects of human labor and organization and animal behavior, in which highelevation corrals near goats’ favored grazing areas make it easier for herders to drive and hold them and then select those to be taken to the lowlands, while releasing the others.
Pederson et al. (2014) have linked the rise of the Mongol Empire (early thirteenth century CE) to a period of warmer and wetter climate in the eastern steppe and record an extended drought during the rise of Khitan power in Mongolia (midto late-tenth-century CE) that gave way to a more productive period during the height of Khitan power. A precise dating of these enclosures to either of these periods might focus our understanding of large-scale rangeland management responses to climate stress or bounty during these periods. On the one hand, enclosures might provide evidence for increased productivity of rangeland during the thirteenth century, requiring additional management strategies for burgeoning herds (Bold 2001: 34). On the other hand, enclosures and corrals in use during a period of drought, such as the mid-tenth or mideleventh century, might be evidence for increased management of resources during a period of decreased steppe productivity.
The scale of these structures should be considered in terms of the potential numbers of animals that they could hold less than in terms of construction investment. This provides some evidence for the number of animals that might have been drawn into a procurement system. Discussions of the organization of population in the Mongol Empire and earlier emphasize the top-down patronage structures and the military basis of the management of population and territory. Decimal organization was the rule for these hierarchies, and the key unit was that of the “thousand,” the economic group that could field a thousand soldiers and presumably support its leaders in the appropriate fashion (Natsagdorj 1967; Bold 1998, 2001: 85; Sneath 2001; Atwood 2012; Rogers 2012). These groups typically contained between 300 and 700 households (Atwood 2012: 26). This unit of administration apparently had spatial definition and particular traditional leaders. Taxes were accounted in these units, as early as the thirteenth century (Atwood 2012: 28-29). Behind the ”thousand” must have been several thousand more people managing herds, raising future soldiers, and so on. From this, we can infer the number of animals that might have been involved in any episode of taxation. Bold (1998) has speculated on the number of animals present on the Mongolian steppe in various historical periods. For this period, he suggests about 21 animals per person, of which 16 (78%) might be sheep or goats. An area with 3500 inhabitants would have had about 56,000 sheep or goats. A one percent tax on that population would have then taken approximately 560 animals. Any of these enclosures could have maintained many hundreds of sheep and goats for short periods 2  This estimate was developed using anecdotal evidence from Mongolia and http://www .mla.com.au/News-and-resources/Tools-and-calculators/Stocking-rate-calculator assuming 400 kg of dry matter per hectare.  and could easily have held the approximately 80 cattle also taken as tax that Bold’s calculations suggest for the same population.
The stones of earlier monumental structures are frequently repurposed for winter corrals (fig. 4). Although we cannot determine the antiquity of this practice, no such modifications occurred to these enclosure walls (cf. Humphrey 2001; Beck 1991). There are three arguments for their preservation within the framework of state taxation. First, a practical one, these walls are not so well built or efficiently located as to invite easy reuse and no one locale features many useful stones, as a monumental mound does. Second, we cannot know exactly who provided the labor to build them. Construction styles are both ordinary (styles similar to everyday corrals) and, possibly, exotic (using rammed-earth construction). The length of these walls would have required the labor of scores of workers to construct, or fewer workers over scores of days. This labor made no detectable impact on the archaeological landscape, apart from the enclosures themselves. These facts suggest that there was little sense of imposition in their construction that might have provoked a hostile response to them. The final argument is that, in the shifting political field of the eastern steppe, the uses of these enclosures were widely understood and they were monuments to administrative know-how. Although the states that built and used them came and went, local power brokers and possible aristocratic administrators (Sneath 2007; Rogers 2012; Atwood 2012) might have found them useful again and thus sought to preserve and maintain them as important places in a long-term stable system of resource management.

Conclusion
This paper has argued that these large enclosures are corrals that are part of a census system for taking animals on the hoof for immediate consumption or transport to satisfy large-scale demands of steppe-based states between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. This study is an example of historical archaeology in Inner Asia. We find ourselves on unfamiliar ground and in new chronological and physical spaces, where both detailed material landscapes and textual accounts are taken together to populate previously unknown or undefined territory (Hume 1964; Shiraishi 2004). If these enclosures are the record of a state-structured pastoralist landscape, their scale and presumably regular use at an intersection of an individual pastoralist’s seasonal migration-round and the movements of nobles, agents, or emperors (Shiraishi 2004; see also Aldred 2013, Ingold 1993, Chang and Koster 1986) may have made these enclosures the most common centers of the administration in the heartlands of medieval Eurasian empires, in terms of both useful and symbolically important steppe-sourced resources flowing to mobile or immobile centers and of the regular contact of subjects with their rulers through levies and seasonal gatherings. Their role as elements of a political landscape (Smith 2003) giving concrete structure to state policies cannot be overlooked, and they are thus key elements in the creation of social relations beyond local herding groups and families. Seen from an administrative center, these corrals are the extremities of the state. Seen from the perspective of the individual herder, large corrals are the great monuments of these medieval states and—if those herders did not regularly interact with the cities or faraway immobile domains of their empires—the most common manifestations of political landscape in their everyday experience.

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