Radiocarbon Challenges: Tightening the Chronology of the Kura-Araxes Culture in the South Caucasus

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Kura-Araxes horizon (KA; 3500–2500 BCE), which characterizes the EBA in the South Caucasus, is at the center of an archaeological debate regarding the timing of its development and dispersal into areas of the greater Near East, including eastern Anatolia, northwestern Iran, and the Southern Levant. Increasing numbers of 14C datasets in the last couple of decades have shed light on the broader absolute timeframe and material periodization in the Caucasian “homeland.” However, even with advances in chronometric approaches, we struggle to capture the considerable heterogeneity of the KA material culture in shared regional contexts. The reversals and plateaus of the calibration curve between 3500 and 2500 BCE pose particular problems. They foster an impression of chronological continuity that overplays a sense of “contemporaneity” in the making of archaeological phases. This, in turn, impacts the social interpretation of the KA chronology due to the difficulty in distinguishing discrete events or groupings. Hence discerning change from continuity becomes problematic. This paper critically addresses chronometric challenges in the dating of the KA horizon and assesses the potential of site-based Bayesian approaches against summing methods, such as kernel density plots, to navigate multiple scales of chronological inquiry.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32739