Local, Regional, and Supra-regional Political Economies in the Late Bronze Age South Caucasus: Unpacking the Contours of "Interaction"

Summary

The Late Bronze Age (LBA) South Caucasus (ca. 1500-1150 BC) has long been understood as an important moment in both the economic and political development of the region’s inhabitants. As local political authorities worked to produce formal governmental institutions and maintain social inequalities, they relied on trade networks of disparate lengths and intensities. The consumption of Mitannian cylinder seals from Mesopotamia and bronze weaponry from the North Caucasus can be contrasted with that of more mundane and locally produced products, recovered side-by-side, but embedded within smaller networks of distribution that were equally important to political projects. This paper explores the connections between these multiple scales of socioeconomic "interaction" and examines what they reveal about our conceptions of material flows more generally. Analyses of pottery and faunal data collected by the Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (ArAGATS) are used to shed light on the economic dynamics of Armenia’s LB Tsaghkahovit Plain and its regional environs, contextualizing them within the broader trends that connected this prehistoric world to the ancient Near East in the south and the vast Eurasian steppe to the north.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Itinerant Matters and Hybrid Objects: Research on material transfers and contact products

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