The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This session will address the state of current archaeological research in the Southern Caucasus region, comprising the current territories of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. This Eurasian land bridging continents from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea has been a crossroads, from the Early Pleistocene, as shown by the presence of Homo Erectus in Dmanisi, Georgia, to recent times with the Russian control on the region. This crossroads status is reflected in the diversity of societies having settled or passed through the land as well as the sequential confluence of academic positions in the study of these societies. Nearly 30 years after independence of this Caucasian troika these "archaeologies", with many historical commonalities and scientific challenges, are moving away from the materialistic paradigm permeating all research in the Soviet Union and find themselves bracing for new approaches in the methodologies to address the theory of our archaeological endeavors, namely the better understanding of the political evolution of the many neighbouring societies in the land. We hope to be able to show not only reliable updated data for the region but also reinforce the foundations for new methodological paradigms aimed at improving the understanding of the Southern Caucasus region.