TRAILS: Tracing Rock Art, Embedded Landscapes of Movement, and Cosmovisions in the Gobi Altai Mountains (Mongolia)

The TRAILS project aims to expand and transform our understanding of mobile pastoralism through an original analysis of the rock art of the Gobi-Altai Mountains (Mongolia). This has been considered one of the heartlands of pastoralism since Late Prehistory but mobile populations past and present are still poorly theorised and often oversimplified as antagonistic entities from a sedentary perspective.

This project challenges prevailing narratives by investigating the complex materiality of rock art in search of embedded landscapes of movement and cosmovisions, arguing that they are crucial to comprehend how local mobile communities navigated their temporal and spatial domains. The research area of the Gobi-Altai Mountains plays a pivotal role in this exploration, as the variety of ecological zones facilitated the development of complex pastoral networks within the wider context of the early 'Silk Roads' interconnections across Eurasia since the second millennium BCE.

The project has a twofold goal. First, to systematically document the rock art and mobility of the research area, establishing an archaeological framework for future inquiry; secondly, to delve into the spatial and temporal dimensions of the local rock art, analysing, for the first time, 17 rock art sites on the Ikh Bogd Mountain, and addressing specific research questions.

By using a novel combination of iconographic, spatial, and archaeoastronomical analysis, the project will generate an integrated and diachronic database of information to illuminate the Mongolian rock art heritage and its relationship with the local pastoral communities and contemporary artists, thus fostering a more inclusive archaeological discourse. The project will also impact the knowledge and preservation of rock art sites, which are today connected with mobility practices and cosmologies that are fast disappearing due to dramatic socio-economic transformations and climate change.