Archaeological Dig Sheds New Light on the Other Great Wall of China

Practically everyone has heard about the Great Wall of China, but the iconic monument is not the only massive frontier in northern East Asia. An international team of researchers has surveyed a section belonging to the Medieval Wall System (MWS), a little-known and extremely remote network of walls, enclosures, and trenches across China, Mongolia, and Russia. Specifically, the researchers investigated a 252-mile-long (405-kilometer) section in Mongolia, called the Mongolian Arc, and conducted an excavation at one of its enclosures. Instead of a thick stone wall, the archaeologists uncovered a shallow ditch, suggesting the barrier didn’t serve defensive purposes. “We sought to determine the use of the enclosure and the Mongolian Arc,” Gideon Shelach-Lavi, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in an Antiquity statement. “What was its function? Was it primarily a military system designed to defend against invading armies, or was it intended to control the empire’s ... Read full article.