The stone monuments of Mongolia’s Altai Mountains trace the web of ancient cultures across that remote land. This study breaks new ground by seeking their cultural significance from within their physical locations and viewsheds.

It is the first study to join the mute stone monuments to the vivid petroglyphic rock art of that region. In that and in the examination of a monument’s individualizing details, I seek to recover the impulse of original intention, the way in which monument and location fix cultural memory, and the way in which memory finally gives way to the cultural development of myth.