New Solutions to Old Challenges: Methods and Results from Project ArAGATS’ Kasakh Valley Archaeological Survey (KVAS) Project, Northwestern Armenia (2015-17)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The South Caucasus witnessed multiple long-term shifts in settlement systems, social organization, and sociopolitics from the Paleolithic and the close of the Bronze Age. Throughout this long history, local environments and human landscapes served as important material and social contexts through which processes of community (re)production unfolded. However local topographies and historic modifications to the landscape present unique challenges to systematic settlement survey in the South Caucasus. In this paper, we discuss results of the last three seasons of pedestrian survey and test excavations in the upper Kasakh River Valley in northwestern Armenia, which have broadened our understanding of changing land-use and settlement patterns. We also highlight some of our methodological approaches to site documentation such as a mobile GIS system and airborne photogrammetric mapping workflows that were developed to help mitigate survey challenges in the region’s heterogeneous landscapes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24131