There are now 20 members of the project spanning 10 nationalities and a great range of specialisms, including academia, creative work and public engagement. We have set up a project website - https://www.horsepowerproject.org/ - to provide broad dissemination of our work.
We carried out two field seasons. In 2023, the first season of excavations in Mongolia was of satellite structures of a large khirgisuurs, site OOR-396, in the Upper Orkhon Valley in Central Mongolia. Ursula BROSSEDER returned to Mongolia for a fieldtrip to Western Mongolia together with the Horsepower team between August 29 and September 6, 2023. The trip had the goal to familiarize our team with the important sites in western Mongolia that are the target of our fieldwork and discuss priorities, procedures and synergies for the team, to get to know our Mongol collaborator Ts. TURBAT and allow for developing mutual understanding and discussion of new ideas. BROSSEDER also continued the trip into China to Xi’an from 6th of September to 12th of September 2023 where the Horsepower Team met the Chinese collaborator the representatives of the Qin Shi Huangdi Mausoleum. Ursula BROSSEDER started the second field season in 2024, in the western Altai. Together with Bayarkhuu NOOST we worked at the site Daltyn Am in northwestern Mongolia. We realized that this site plays a key role in understanding the chronological sequence from the earliest Bronze Age (or Neolithic) to potentially to the Late Bronze Age. These periods are crucial for understanding how communities experimented and worked with the horse until horse-borne nomadism was fully established in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500 BCE). We excavated three burials. We then moved on to the Türgen gol valley where we mapped the sites. The team then continued in Khovd Province and was led by Bayarkhuu NOOST.
Ludovic ORLANDO has performed preliminary analyses on ancient horse genomes sequenced within this 18 months-period, including from the OOR-396 site excavated by Ursula BROSSEDER. These analyses confirm: (1) breeding practices almost devoid of inbreeding, (2) Deer Stone-Khirigsur sacrificial practices not focused on a single bloodline sharing similar coat-coloration phenotypes, (3) the nearly absence of genetic relatedness within members of the same archaeological site, excepting multiple burials often involving first- or second-degree relatives, (4) a change in the genetic makeup of Asian horse populations after the end of the Bronze Age.
For case studies, HUAN worked with Ursula BROSSEDER on the Yuhuangmiao group in northeast China, revealing both external cultural connections and internal social dynamics of this regional group. HUAN was also engaged with other team members on holistic approaches to archaeological materials, especially on three topics: archaeometallurgy, objects and material cultural studies, and settlement archaeology. Bayarkhuu NOOST advanced the project’s understanding of ancient metallurgy. He authored a review article on the technological and cultural evolution of metallurgy within the broader Eurasian context.
Dame Professor Jessica Rawson is one of the premier specialists of Chinese archaeology in the west and provides expert advice and direction for the project mainly in China, but also in the broader region of Mongolia and the steppe. Elizabeth Allen administers the Horsepower project as a whole.
Xuizhen Li has been vital in setting up and maintaining links with the First Emperor’s Mausoleum Museum. She has also been pulling together archaeological material from the First Emperor’s Mausoleum, much of which is not available in English, in addition to broader archaeological evidence from across northern China from the first millennium BCE. She and Gosden are also preparing an article on the cosmology of the Qin period, the manner in which this underpinned political power and lay behind the spatial ordering of major sites, such as the First Emperor’s Mausoleum complex. Samples of horse bones were taken from the First Emperor’s Mausoleum complex. Akari Goda-Maurezutt has started to sample horse gear, belt plaques and knives from the collections of the British Museum, the results of which will be available shortly.
Ruiliang Liu of the British Museum (funded by UKRI) has supervised and spearheaded three major tasks in this phase, including (1) scientific analysis of bronze objects, (2) radiocarbon dating of related horse-skeletons and archaeological sites and (3) negotiation with Chinese collaborators for new samples, publications and fieldworks. Ruiliang Liu has audited all the early Chinese bronzes stored at the British Museum and have identified approximately 500 objects are related to Horsepower, all of which have been documented with images and measurement and have not been published in any previous literature.
