REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH
The Altai region of western Mongolia has long been considered marginal in broader Eurasian archaeological narratives. In this book, William Fitzhugh and Richard Kortum build a compelling case for the region’s centrality in the evolution of nomadic societies, hunting cultures, and ritual landscapes. Drawing on decades of fieldwork around Khoton Lake and the surrounding valleys, the authors document hundreds of petroglyph panels and burial features, using the glaciated bedrock as both literal and metaphorical foundation for a 20,000-year cultural continuum.
Ritual Landscape: rock art and archaeology in the Mongolian Altai, richly layered and meticulously researched, achieves something rarely done at this scale: the seamless integration of rock-art studies with traditional archaeological investigation, all within the dramatic and geologically unique landscape of the Mongolian Altai.
One of the book’s core achievements lies in its explicit commitment to bridging what are often two isolated scholarly fields – rock art (for want of a better term) and archaeology. The authors demonstrate that rock art, when understood in conjunction with mortuary architecture, stratified sites, and environmental context, becomes a vibrant thread in the fabric of human history rather than an isolated aesthetic phenomenon. This approach allows them to reinterpret petroglyphs not as passive visual records, but as elements in ritual and social life, aligned with burials, ceremonial monuments, and glacially polished rock surfaces deliberately selected for their symbolic resonance.
