Regional Political Economies in the South Caucasus: Tracing Social Boundaries in a Eurasian Context

Summary

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 local models of political organization and economic life articulate with the broader dynamics of circulation, boundaries, and human movement that tied the residents of the South Caucasus into a regional ecumene with a common sociopolitical vocabulary? What relates our understandings of site-based devotional life, bodily adornment, and commodity stockpiling to the flows of people and products that traversed political communities? Data from the Kasakh Valley Archaeological Survey of Project ArAGATS are now providing access points to these regional aspects of society and economy. At the same time, they are illuminating the paths and stakes of geographically extensive political archaeology more generally.

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): 17080