Imperial networks and local resistance at the edge of a highland empire in the Middle East/South Caucasus (Iron Age Urartu)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pedestrians: Current Research in GIS-Based Movement Modeling for Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The study of ancient states and empires has often suffered from an under-appreciation of internal spatial/temporal variability in material culture and means of territorial control. Spatial network conceptions facilitate a better understanding of ancient states and empires’ development and forms of political cohesion/integration. A network conception is particularly critical for highland polities where uneven topography and transportation costs severely limited the ability of pre-industrial administrations to impose control over expansive territories and therefore would have encouraged the concentration of efforts at landscape nodes. In this study, I use landscape archaeology data and GIS analyses of movement to develop network reconstructions of the empire of Urartu, located in eastern Anatolia, northwestern Iran, Armenia, and Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan, c. 800-600 BCE. The territory across which the Urartians expanded is topographically rugged, and no other highly centralized ancient state was ever based in the region. Network reconstructions provide insight into how the Urartians integrated the fragmented areas that constituted their eastern provinces as well as how they interacted with and transformed the societies on their edges. Most importantly, the network reconstructions help illuminate a possible example of local resistance to territorial control by independent local groups at the fringes of the Urartian realm.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ancient Pedestrians: Current Research in GIS-Based Movement Modeling for Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51949