Crowdsourcing Week: Valley of the Khans Project, Mongolia

Crowdsourcing is going to play a big role in archaeology's future. This week I'm bringing you four projects that use it to harness the enthusiasm of ordinary people to fuel innovative research. 

National Geographic

The Valley of the Khans Project  is using non-invasive methods to map and discover archaeological sites in a remote part of Mongolia traditionally considered the homeland of Genghis Khan. Led by UCSD researcher Albert Lin, the project relies on a combination of high-tech remote sensing with a huge amount of free unskilled labor.

Procrastinators with a computer (or 'Citizen Scientists' as the project calls them) can go to the National Geographic website and scan high-resolution satellite photos, tagging interesting features like roads, rivers, ancient structures, and modern features. Lin explains how it works:


The interface is easy and fun to use, and it's fascinating to see the variety of Mongolian landscapes: deserts, deep forests, rivers, steppe. There's plenty of empty images but a surprising number of features to find. So far 16,000 volunteers have placed over one million tags on 785,000 image tiles. That's several years of drudgery, virtually for free. Go over to NatGeo and check it out!

The key to getting good results with crowdsourcing is repetition. The 'average' person doesn't spot everything, but show the same image to a hundred people and their cumulative responses will catch almost everything. Once interesting features are identified, the research team is using a host of high-tech contraptions - including electro-resistive tomography, ground-penetrating radar, and a remote-controlled, six-blade helicopter (!) - to ground truth them. 

The 'hexacopter', probably the most ridiculously high-tech archaeology gadget ever (Nat Geo)

The era of the lone researcher sitting at a desk is coming to an end. This here is the future of archaeology: non-invasive methods and public participation.  

Genghis Khan Week: Genghis Khan energy drink

Which great conqueror in history gives you the most energy?! That's right!



Genghis Khaaaaaaaaan

Genghis Khan Week: Chinggis Beer!

Archaeopop theme weeks continue as we check out pop culture versions of world-conqueror Genghis Khan. Beginning with this ad for Chinggis Beer from 1998.



Glorious and refreshing. Yes, it's in Mongolian. No, I don't understand the voiceover either. But I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be the Great Khan getting turned on to beer by a monk. (Indeed, beer is the most precious contribution of Christian monks to world civilization.)

According to their promo material, the company is a Swiss-Mongolian joint venture that brews according to the 1516 German  beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot. That would explain why the brewery has a very German-looking beer hall attached, which you can visit if you ever find yourself in Ulan Bator. How's that for globalization and history combined?!?! The Chinggis Beer website is in Mongolian but has a great trance-downtempo-throatsinging soundtrack, check it out.

This is not to be confused with the Genghis Khan Beer of Inner Mongolia (part of China), which "has miraculous health effects to the diseases of gastrointestinal, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems as well as ten more other diseases. So far it is the only natural health beer in China approved by the Ministry of Public Health of China and it is the first origination in the world." So healthy. (It also says "Guinness" at least twice on the label, whoa!)