In November, Yale archaeologist William Honeychurch received the Order of the Polar Star from Mongolia — the highest civilian honor the country’s government bestows on foreign citizens. In accepting the award, Honeychurch joined esteemed company: Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton are among the other Americans to accept the honor.

Honeychurch first visited Mongolia as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1991, when the country, a former Soviet satellite state, was transitioning to democracy. He began forging relationships with Mongolian archaeologists, teaching them English as they taught him about their work. He returned after earning his doctorate, and has worked in the country ever since, focusing his research on ancient nomadic political organization in East and Central Asia.

He study the Xiongnu, who formed the first major Mongolian state under the leadership of Shanyu Modun beginning in about the third century B.C. It was a pastoral nomadic state, which for anthropologists is a difficult concept to understand: How was it that mobile herders created a state?

It’s an issue that archaeologists refer to as ‘emergent complexity,’ which concerns how societies become differentiated, unequal, and specialized. So an interesting question is, how does that work with horse nomads? If mobility is built into your culture, that means your economy, politics, and urban models are different than sedentary models of those same things. I study the idea that a mobile culture will format its entire society differently than a more sedentary culture.

Covering 300 square kilometers can take years. He has been working in Eastern Mongolia since 2015 and, so far, we’ve covered about 150 square kilometers while recording more than 2,000 new archaeological sites.