Surviving the Crisis Years? Exploring the Bronze Age-Iron Age Transition in the South Caucasus

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

From the Balkans to the Iranian Plateau, the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age was a critical period of transformation, defined by crisis, collapse, resurgence and reorganization. The South Caucasus appears an unusual exception to this broader trend, one whose significance for the broader study of Late Bronze Age Collapse has yet to be fully appreciated. This paper outlines and evaluates existing archaeological evidence for continuity across the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age in the South Caucasus, focusing on material culture, economic organisation, and settlement structure. I suggest several possible explanations for the divergent trajectory of this region, and introduce my ongoing research aimed at investigating these hypotheses. Such investigations not only illuminate distinctive features of Late Bronze Age societies in the South Caucasus, they also, by way of contrast, shape our understanding of the Late Bronze Age collapse in the wider Near East, and indeed of the global study of collapse, resilience, and regeneration.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51280