Sacred Imagery and Ritual Landscape: New Discoveries at the Biluut Petroglyph Complex in the Mongolian Altai

Abstract

Altaian rock art is increasingly seen as essential to our grasp of the character and movements of ancient cultures throughout Inner Asia. Rock art imagery often provides our only pictorial information about a preliterate society. But while surface study by itself yields valuable information, joining the examination of rock art with dirt archaeology, geology, and paleoecology provides greater opportunities for advances in our understanding of key developments in the region’s dynamic prehistory: horse domestication and associated technologies, the birth of mobile pastoralism, the incursion of charioteers, the making and spread of deer stones, and the advent of metallurgy, to name but a few. This paper focuses on the Biluut Petroglyph Complex, a prehistoric ceremonial center at Khoton Lake in far-western Mongolia’s High Altai, which contains an array of archaeological sites associated with an unusually dense concentration of petroglyphs spanning the past 8–10,000 years. In presenting results of recent research carried out by his team at Khoton Lake, the author demonstrates the value of integrating rock art studies with other disciplines. The investigation of ritual landscape is crucial. Together with their pictorial details, the chronological distribution and spatial organization of petroglyph figure-types and stone monuments yield important clues concerning the lifeways of ancient peoples and the transmission of arts, ideas, and technologies throughout this culturally formative mountain zone. The focus and approach can serve as models globally.