PhD candidate, Aspen Greaves, will defend her dissertation "Agropastoralist Subsistence of Households in the Mongol Empire".

How did hinterland households navigate life during the Mongol Empire? In Tarvagatai Valley, north central Mongolia, it was    through flexible multiresource pastoralism predicated on pastoralist animal management, small-scale agriculture, and household metallurgical production. This dissertation used a multimethod approach, combining paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, geophysical survey, and traditional excavation methods to holistically explore a unique household context from the Mongol period (13-14th century). 

Rather than intensifying production for imperial markets or maintaining isolated traditional practices, households at Tsagaan Ereg grafted new economic activities onto existing pastoral lifeways without fundamentally reorganizing their livestock management. This household-scale perspective reveals how ordinary families in the empire's heartland actively shaped their own economic strategies, challenging elite historical narratives about imperial transformation.