Understanding Mongolian History through Collaborative Research and Public Discussion

Summary of Report by  Erdene Myagmar, ACMS Visiting Scholar Fellow

On March 15^th 2013,   Dr. Erdene Myagmar from the Department of Archeology and Anthropology at the National University of Mongolia returned from her three month visit to Western Michigan University.  As a recipient of the ACMS Visiting Scholar Fellowship, she worked in collaboration with Dr. Jacqueline Eng and her graduate student J. Gomez  to conduct a comparative analysis of the Asian population archeological data sets to address interesting new questions about population health during different time periods.  This resulted in a collaborative paper “Investigation of the Effects of Diet, Sex, and Age on Dental Health Among Ancient Asian Samples from China and Mongolia” which was presented at the 40^th annual North American Meeting of the Paleopathological Association held  April 9-13, 2013.

 During her fellowship she also conducted two other projects with the Department of Physical Anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of  Natural History.  One was the examination of cranial nonmetric traits  of  Native American remains to be used in future research of the biological affinities of Asian and American populations.  The other was the study of long bones and skeletal material from fetal, infant and sub-adult remains of a known age to be used for comparison with bioarcheological excavations within Mongolia.

Dr. Erdene also provided two well received public lectures during her stay in Kalamazoo.  The first was on “Bronze Age nomadic cultures of Southern and Eastern Mongolia” targeted to professors and graduate students of Anthropology.  The second was titled “Mongolian Nomads: History and Culture” which was targeted to a more general academic population.

We congratulate Dr. Erdene Myagmar and welcome amongst the ranks of the ACMS Alumni.