Research Units enable groups of researchers to tackle some of the pressing questions in their fields of expertise and open up innovative areas of work. They can be funded for up to eight years. The Research Unit that has now been approved is the 11th such group currently based at the University of Bonn.
The new project is focusing on the remains of two cities in present-day Mongolia that were founded from scratch by the descendants of Genghis Khan: Karakorum, the former capital of the Mongol Empire, and Khar Khul Khaany Balgas. They are symbolic of the Mongols’ dramatic shift from nomadic pastoralists to city-dwellers. These two cities form the starting point for the “Urban Impacts on the Mongolian Plateau – Entanglements of Economy, City, and Environment” Research Unit. It is planning to investigate both the two city complexes themselves and how they influenced the surrounding areas over time, focusing on the urban “metabolism,” including topics such as energy supply, food production and construction materials. The speaker for the unit is Professor Jan Bemmann from the Department of Prehistoric and Early-Historic Archaeology in the Institute for Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bonn, who is also a member of the Past Worlds and Modern Questions. Cultures Across Time and Space Transdisciplinary Research Area (the TRA Present Pasts for short).
You can find an overview of the Research Units at the University of Bonn at
https://www.uni-bonn.de/en/research-and-teaching/research-profile/collaborative-research-projects/dfg-projects?set_language=en.