Abstract

William Honeychurch, Joshua Wright, and Chunang Amartuvshin
A Nested Approach to Survey in the Egiin Gol Valley, Mongolia
Journal of Field Archaeology 32 (2007) 339--352

Defining an appropriate and adequate survey area is usually the first and most difficult step in survey research design. This paper presents an example from the Egiin Gol Survey project in which current models for nomadic polity development were evaluated against spatial data collected from a valley in north central Mongolia. The survey presented methodological challenges since no prior systematic survey had been conducted in Mongolia and the mobility of steppe groups likely produced significant variation in social scales across the region in question. To address these factors, we did not select a pre-defined survey area with a fixed boundary. Instead, we expanded our regional perspective by creating zones of different survey resolution and applying knowledge of site location from higher resolution surveys to areas still unstudied. Through this nested resolution method, we acquired data at progressively lower cost, enlarged our survey coverage dramatically, and accounted for shifts in socio-spatial scales relevant to our research problem.

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