Landscape archaeological research around nomadic cities in East Mongolia: Results of the 2019 fieldwork of the Khi-Land project

The “Khi-Land, Khitan Landscapes in Mongolia 2017–2023” project coordinates landscape archaeological research on 10th-12th-century Mongolian Khitan sites. As we have already reported in two previous issues of Hungarian Archaeology, the fieldwork, undertaken in various locations in Mongolia, aims to assess the most significant fortifications of the period and to gain a better understanding of connections between the nomadic ways of life and the fortified cities that came into being in the Empire. This study summarizes the most important findings of the fieldwork in 2019 and presents additional pieces of data acquired on other time periods, as well as new research questions that arose in connection with the sites we explored. One of these questions is whether and how Khitan fortifications can be interpreted as landscape-altering elements in later periods.