065: Dig Eastern Mongolia: explore the world of ancient nomads

Instructors

Jargalan Burentogtokh (Ulaanbaatar. Mongolia - 1984)

Associate Professor of Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology, Anthropology and Demography of the National University of Mongolia. He holds a BA in Archaeology and History (2007) and an MA in Archaeology (2009) from the National University of Mongolia, and an MPhil (2013) and a PhD in Anthropology (2017) from Yale University. He worked at the Institute of Archaeology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences (2007-2010) and taught at Yale University as a lecturer (2018-2019).

Between 2010 and 2022 he was one of the directors of a multidisciplinary project in north-central Mongolia on the habitation archaeology of past nomads and their large-scale monuments. Since 2024 he has directed, with his scientific team, the Khairt Suurin project in eastern Mongolia, a collaboration between the National University of Mongolia, Yale University and Pennsylvania State University that studies the settlements of the Xiongnu period.

Asa Cameron (Philadelphia. USA - 1990)

Postdoctoral Scholar in Environmental Archaeology at the Department of Anthropology of Pennsylvania State University. He holds a BA in Anthropology from Vanderbilt University (2012), an MA in Archaeology from Cornell University (2016) and a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University (2025), with a dissertation on pastoral practices, mobility and subsistence in the Xiongnu period of Mongolia studied through stable isotopes.

He has been one of the directors of archaeological projects in Mongolia and in the United States, where he also worked as an archaeological field director. His research covers ancient mobile agropastoralism, mortuary customs and animal sacrifice, zooarchaeology and isotope analysis.