Abstract

Susanne Reichert is a Humboldt Foundation-funded visiting researcher at the University of Michigan. Her work spans the Eurasian continent with a focus on Western early medieval archaeology and the archaeology of the Mongol World Empire in Mongolia. She is currently researching the Empires of Charlemagne of the 8th and 9th centuries CE in Western Europe and the Mongol World Empire founded by Chinggis Khan in the 13th century in a cross-cultural perspective in order to overcome the hackneyed cliché of the Nomad-sedentary dichotomy. Her research will explore the areas of economy, military, ideology, and administration through intensive comparisons between the two case studies. In recent years, Susanne led several field research campaigns around Karakorum, the first capital of Mongol Empire in the Orkhon Valley, Central Mongolia, as well as Khar Khul Khaany Balgas, a contemporaneous habitation site in Central Mongolia, to arrive at a better understanding of city–hinterland relations and the nature of pastoralist city foundations.

Jan Bemmann is a specialist in the archaeology of the Mongol Empire (1206–1368), focussing on the analysis of multi-faceted dependencies in this quickly-expanding and enormous state. The political and economic success of the Mongol World Empire highly depends on the exploitation and deportation of specialists out of the conquered regions into Inner Asia. Advisors, literati, bureaucrats, artists, astronomers and the like are gathered at the court(s), artisans, architects and farmers specialized in irrigation are settled in newly-founded cities, builders of war machines, engineers and parts of defeated armies are integrated into one of the most successful armies in the Old World. Jan Bemmann compares the strategy of moving people and knowledge in the Mongol Empire with similar practices in earlier Inner Asian steppe empires.

Join us to hear about their recent research in Mongolia, through an investigation of cities of the Mongol Empire.