Caucasus (Other Keyword)
1-7 (7 Records)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological investigations at the Iron Age hill fortress of Oğlanqala in Azerbaijan’s Naxçivan Autonomous Republic have provided key insight into political complexity in the ancient Caucasus. However, small finds and distinctive architecture attest to an equally compelling (if murkier) early twentieth century past. This paper...
The Fortress Refigured: Authority and Community in the South Caucasus (ca. 1500-300 BC) (2015)
In many world regions, the mountain fortress has long stood as little more than a practical instrument of institutionalized force. Such reductionism obscures more than it reveals, for fortresses are equally salient as projects of communal labor, mediators in the making of subjects and authorities, and objects of contestation, curation, and commemoration. In the South Caucasus, fortresses played a crucial role in the reproduction of polities from the Late Bronze Age to the mid-first millennium...
Grounded: A Late Bronze Age fortress on the Şerur Valley floor, Naxçivan (2016)
The Middle to Late Bronze Age transition in the South Caucasus is generally characterized by a shift from small settlements and elaborate kurgan burials to hilltop fortresses and smaller burials grouped in cemeteries. It has been argued that the hilltop fortresses with their broad view over the landscape served as anchors to the mobile populations that surrounded them, and ultimately to the development of increased social hierarchies at these fortresses. This pattern has been identified...
Late Bronze Age in the North Caucasus – Shaping a new culture for a new millennium (2017)
After more than one millennium of mobile pastoral lifeways, the mid-2nd millennium BC witnessed the reappearance of village-based life in an area stretching from the Black Sea, across Caucasia to Anatolia and North Western Iran. Its manifestation is the emergence of stone-built dwellings clustered in small or middle-sized settlements. Concurrently, the transformation of the 3rd millennium BC mobile pastoralism into combined mountain agriculture allowed retaining a pastoral economy in spite of a...
Lithic technology transfer and the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the South Caucasus (2015)
Recently, several discoveries in Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan have shed new light on the processes involved in the development of food production economy in the South Caucasus. If a series of excavations using modern techniques have provided an improved chronological and cultural framework for this complex phenomenon, several interrogations remain. What is the role of the hunter-gatherer population in the domestication process? Is the presence of Neolithic cultures in this area the result of...
Reformulating Cultural Heritage Management Strategies in the Post-Soviet Caucasus region. (2017)
The inheritance of Soviet-molded approaches to cultural heritage has seen slow changes in the last two decades in ex-Soviet South Caucasian countries. This is not surprising: if the same specialists continue to run and manage heritage change is expected to be slow; new generations are just starting to work in state agencies. The exposure of the systems to new approaches and its practical application is a difficult task. To compound the problems, the heritage of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia is...
Shifting Human-Environmental Interactions in the Late Prehistoric Periods of Southern Caucasia (2015)
The Caucasus Mountain range is an exceptionally dynamic landscape whose diverse topographic, tectonic, hydrological, climatic, and pedological dimensions provided the backdrop to equally vibrant social transitions from the Neolithic through the Iron Age. The past two decades of intensive excavations and radiocarbon dates in the South Caucasus (particularly Armenia and Georgia) have resulted in important refinements to material culture sequences from the first farmers to the earliest political...