Dr. Tanguy Rolland hat seine Dokorarbeit "Nouvelle lecture des structures funéraires de l'âge du Bronze en Mongolie via une analyse des éléments architecturaux, de leur agencement et de leur forme" an der Université de Bourgogne im Dezember 2023 verteidigt, und wird im Rahmen seines Besuchs in Bonn über seine Forschungen in der Mongolei sprechen.
Zusammenfassung des Vortrags:
The archaeological landscape of Mongolia is marked by the presence of numerous funerary monuments (khirigsuurs) and engraved stelae (deer stones), erected by nomadic populations at the end of the Bronze Age. The first observations indicate great regularity in the choice and arrangement of the architectural and iconographic elements at the time when these structures were built suggesting the existence of shared traditions and social coherence between nomadic communities.
The data available today do not provide sufficient perspective to establish social models at the level of a province, and even less so at the scale of the country. Such a study, never before carried out over the entire Mongolian territory, would require the implementation of data acquisition, analysis, and processing methods adapted to the establishment of a large corpus obtained by archaeological prospection.
The solutions presented are inspired by many other scientific fields. They are applied to a series of monuments in two valleys in central Mongolia. The acquisition of the structures was facilitated by the production of hundreds of 3D models and orthomosaics of the sites, obtained by photogrammetry. A method for highlighting the relief of 3D models was developed in order to provide a three-dimensional reading of the symbols engraved on the stelae. From the orthomosaics, the stones composing the khirigsuurs were delineated with great precision through supervised machine learning approaches; understanding the layout of the monument was thus greatly facilitated. New systems for describing deer stones and khirigsuurs were established, and then applied in order to produce unsupervised classifications of these structures.