Kura-Araxes Herding Practices in Early Bronze Age Armenia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, I present an analysis of Early Bronze Age (EBA) faunal remains from field investigations conducted between 1998 and 2018 in the Tsaghkahovit plain of northern Armenia by the joint Armenian-American Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS). The vast majority of Project ArAGATS’s EBA fauna was recovered from the well-documented site of Gegharot. Excavations at Gegharot revealed an agro-pastoral village, with other lines of evidence indicating a minimally differentiated social structure. This paper examines Kura-Araxes egalitarianism from the perspective of Gegharot’s faunal data. Identification of differential status may be possible through context specific analyses, e.g., comparing between houses or areas of the site and identifying consumption of limited parts of the animal vs. consumption of whole animals, or by consumption of hunted animals vs. reared animals. The site includes well-defined Early Bronze stratigraphic layers, distinguished by distinct Kura-Araxes ceramic complexes, allowing for the investigation of change over time in herd composition and management. I specifically examine the data for distinct herding practices between and within taxa in order to assess whether distinct herds of animals can be identified in the faunal record.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38852.0