The Early–Middle Pleistocene Settlement of Northern Armenia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Northern Armenia and southern Georgia, divided in the Haghtanak-Bagratashen area by the Debed River, witnessed considerable volcanic activity between ~2.1 and 1.6 Ma, toward the end of which the earliest evidence of Homo outside Africa is found at Dmanisi. The rich assemblages of lithic, faunal, and human fossil materials found at Dmanisi date to ~1.77 Ma and have fundamentally altered our understanding of the hominin morphological attributes and technological capabilities upon which this hominin expansion was based. Thus, the region is now well established as an important archive of early paleoanthropological data. Recent research conducted at Haghtanak-3 (HAG3) suggests that the base of its stratigraphic sequence may be coeval with Dmanisi as it sits atop a 1.95 Ma basalt flow and unifacial core/choppers, non-hierarchical cores, simple flakes, and hard hammer percussion dominate the artifact assemblage. Therefore, a combination of chronological, stratigraphic, and archaeological parallels exists between Dmanisi and HAG3, providing an opportunity to expand our understanding of the earliest expansion of Homo out of Africa with new, highly contextualized geoarchaeological and paleoenvironmental data. HAG3 also contains a stratigraphic sequence that continues into the Middle Pleistocene, thus providing detailed information on later phases of technological development and hominin behavior.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Pleistocene Landscapes and Hominin Behavior in the Armenian Highlands

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36883.0