HOLOCENE LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMATIONS BY EARLY HERDERS, AS AN ADAPTIVE STRATEGY TO DESERTIFICATION IN THE GOBI DESERT OF MONGOLIA

Since the retreat of the Pleistocene some 11,700 years ago, the landscape and vegetation of the Mongolian Gobi Desert has been profoundly changing, punctuated by the appearance of saline lakes, wetlands, and finally aridification. Human groups have lived, foraged, and traveled throughout the Gobi for millennia, adapting their technologies and resource use with these dramatic environmental changes, and likely contributed to the character of the landforms, sediments, and soils in the region today. The most profound landscape changes came with the convergence of a drier climate in the late Holocene, and the earliest herding societies to enter the fragile natural environments of the Gobi at that time. There is much literature on the negative impact of sheep and goat pastoralists on soils and vegetation communities when these populations move into dryland regions worldwide. This has often been used as an excuse to exclude and relocate traditional herder societies from dryland zones. However, on the contrary, our research at the Ikh Nart Nature Reserve, Dornogovi Province, Mongolia has yielded geoarchaeological and phytolith data sets which show that early pastoralists in the Gobi Desert actually enriched the soils within the valleys, changing them from alkaline and saline sediments to soils that were able to support the steppe grasses needed to sustain their herds. This case study demonstrates an example of niche construction, and the development of Landesque capital that has supported pastoralists in the Gobi Desert for four thousand years.