Reconstructing land-use and agropastoral production during the Middle Bronze Age of the Southern Caucasus: Preliminary results from Qızqala, Autonomous Republic of Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan.

Summary

Inhabitants of the Middle Bronze Age in the Southern Caucasus (c. 2400–1500 BC ) are thought to be highly mobile communities, heavily reliant on pastoral resources. Few settlements have been recovered archaeologically, and fewer still excavated. New work from the Middle Bronze Age settlements and kurgans at Qızqala on the Şerur Plain in the Autonomous Republic of Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan therefore fills an important lacuna in our understanding of the lifeways of Middle Bronze Age peoples. We report on the initial results of an integrated analysis of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological evidence for agropastoral production in the Middle Bronze Age from the 2014 and 2015 excavations. These data speak not only to the intentional management choices Middle Bronze Age inhabitants made regarding their floral and faunal resources, but also to their land use practices and potential environmental impacts. Here we test the prevailing hypothesis that inhabitants’ lifeways in this period were largely predicated on sheep and goat husbandry. By examining the types and timing of subsistence activities visible in the Qizqala record, this study sheds light on MBA foodways, and the implications it has on the relative periods of mobility and sedentism built into inhabitants’ seasonal rounds.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage