Khirigsuurs sustained ceremonies that legitimized the relationship between the deceased and the participants, facilitated the formation of new alliances, and emphasized integration and cohesion between mobile pastoralist communities through monument building, ritual horse slaughter, and feasting.
Khirigsuurs are communal ritual and mortuary monuments that featured prominently on Late Bronze Age pastoralist landscapes of the Mongolian steppe through the mid-late second millennium to early first millennium cal BC. Differences in tooth wear between sampled wild and foddered animals may also contribute to the observed δ15N differences. The difference in nitrogen isotopes between wild and foddered animals may be due to increased access in quality graze through foddering by domestic caprines, which results in improved nutrition and extended lactation periods, or enriched δ15N of fodder plants relative to background flora. Provisioned caprines also display significantly different nitrogen isotopic values relative to non-provisioned animals. This pattern reflects the consumption of C4 plants year-round by provisioned caprines while non-provisioned caprines ingest C4 plants only during the summer months.
Foddered caprines display significantly different δ13C values compared to non-provisioned caprines. In this study, foddering practices are examined in modern domestic and wild caprines from Mongolia (Baga Gazar'in Chuluu) through carbon and nitrogen analyses of bulk sampled dentin collagen in molar teeth. Direct identification of fodder provisioning in individual animals is a previously unexplored area that has important implications for determining animal husbandry strategies in prehistory.