South Caucasus (Other Keyword)
1-11 (11 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the twentieth century, archaeological investigations into the Hellenistic and Roman periods in Armenia sought to understand the ancient kingdom’s place in the broader Mediterranean sphere. The projects often worked to identify cultures and cultural...
Examining Origins of Ceramic Production in Lerik, Azerbaijan (Late Iron Age to Late Antique Period): Insights from Ceramic Petrographic Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research examines manufacturing technology and origin of production of ceramics from the necropolis at Piboz Tepe and site at Yoladoy Bin in the Lerik region of Azerbaijan through utilization of ceramic petrography and surface treatment analysis. Data obtained through petrography analysis indicates whether ceramics were locally produced or imported...
Landscapes of Death and Burial in the South Caucasus: The Kurgans of Naxçivan, Azerbaijan (2016)
While burials have long been an important source of archaeological information, they have traditionally been studied mainly from a site-based perspective. This traditional view focuses on the form of the burial, the grave goods contained, and osteological evidence on the age, sex and health of the interred individual. By contrast, the landscape approach studies burials as part of a broader natural and cultural landscape that extends beyond site boundaries. This project focuses on kurgan burials...
Medieval Fortifications of the Mountainous South Caucasus (Zakagori Fortress in Truso Valley, North Georgia) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zakagori fortress in Truso Valley, Northern Georgia (South Caucasus) represents unique medieval complex which was controlling military and economical routs leading from the South to the North in medieval times. This unique complex is known as an architectural and archaeological monument, which combines stratas and sediments of High and Late Medieval...
Motif and Milieu: Deconstructing the (Re)production of the Kura-Araxes Culture (3500-2400 BC) (2017)
How do material remains – and the imagery that adorns them – inform our understanding of past landscapes? How does knowledge of landscapes enrich our understanding of the objects produced within them? This paper explores the relationship between iconography and environment in the Early Bronze Age Kura-Araxes (3500-2400 BC) culture. The Kura-Araxes was arguably the most widespread archaeological horizon in the ancient Near East, extending from the Caucasus to the Levant to the Zagros Mountains....
(Re)Articulating Ancient Lives: Diet and Movement in Late Bronze Age Societies in the South Caucasus (2015)
The sudden appearance of hilltop citadels and vast cemeteries on the Late Bronze Age landscape of the South Caucasus suggests that it was a period of dynamic socio-political transformation as society shifted from highly mobile agropastoralism to a more settled lifestyle revolving around fortresses. Yet, within the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia, there is little archaeological evidence of domestic architecture and activities, throwing into question people’s residential and subsistence practices....
Regional Political Economies in the South Caucasus: Tracing Social Boundaries in a Eurasian Context (2017)
After more than a century of Russian Imperial and Soviet research dominated by the excavation of tumulus burials, researchers in the South Caucasus have now spent two decades investigating exactly how settlement archaeology sheds light on the inhabitants of the region's earliest polities (ca. 1500-1150 BC). Most of this data has emerged from the sites of the Tsaghkahovit Plain, which have served as a micro-regional laboratory for Bronze and Iron Age studies since 1998. But how exactly do these...
Royal Numismatic Hoard from Samshvilde (Political and Economic Aspect of the Medieval South Caucasus based on Archaeological Data) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Samshvilde, in the South Caucasus (Southern Georgia), is a complex and multi-period archaeological site. The historical city occupies an impregnable location on a basalt cape flanked by the deep valleys. This distinctive landscape, combined with environmental conditions and abundant natural resources, have attracted people for millennia, but the “Golden...
Sites, landscapes, and survey intensity in the South Caucasus: the evolution of landscape archaeology approaches in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (2017)
In the last decade, the number of landscape archaeology projects in South Caucasia has dramatically increased. South Caucasia geographically and disciplinarily sits between two early centers of survey archaeology (Near East and Mediterranean), each with its own methodologies and primary questions. The mountainous landscapes of South Caucasia, the high degree of population mobility in many periods, and the extent of Soviet land engineering challenge archaeologists to develop hybrid survey...
Space and Scale in Reconstructions of the Social Organization of Craft Production (2017)
Archaeologists often speak of production in spatial terms, contrasting nucleated and dispersed forms of crafting. However, the importance of the scale of spatial patterning in production activities (as opposed to "scale" in reference to quantitative output) has yet to be fully explored. It is impossible to relate the spatial distribution of crafting activities to a particular social organization of production without considering spatial scale. An examination of spatial distributions at multiple...
The Walking Dead: Osteological and isotopic indicators of mobility from Middle Bronze Age commingled human and faunal burials in Naxcivan, Azerbaijan (2015)
Tracing the mobility patterns of pastoralists and their herds is a critical part of illuminating the lifeways of people who inhabited the southern Caucasus in the past. During the 2014 season, the Naxcivan Archaeological Project excavated several Middle Bronze age kurgans overlooking the Şərur Plain. In these burials humans and animals were interred together, speaking to the significance of the animals in the lifeways of the people inhabiting the area during the Middle Bronze Age. We correlate...