Late Bronze Age in the North Caucasus – Shaping a new culture for a new millennium

Summary

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 stationary lifeway for another 600 or 700 years. A German-Russian co-operation project investigated more than 280 sites in the Northern Caucasus (Russia) that reflect the formation of the new settlement system using an integrated spectrum of multidisciplinary research methods.

As a result, we can today draw a first picture on the formation and the transformation of the Late Bronze Age in the Northern Caucasus, a period before nearly unknown due to fact that sites in the lowlands are missing. This epoch sees a new mountain based culture that incorporates local groups as well as shifting populations from the steppe region. This overview will present the first draft of the chronological, economic and social developments that shaped this new cultural phenomenon in the 2nd millennium BC.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Ongoing Research in Eurasian Archaeology: Assessing the Implications of New Evidence

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14999