Heads and Hooves in Late Bronze Age Armenia: Contextualizing the Post-mortem Circulation of Animal Remains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Divergent Paths, Shared Histories: Examining Archaeological Trends from the Caucasus to Mongolia" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The phenomenon of depositing the head and lower extremities of herd animals in mortuary and ritual contexts was widespread across Eurasia, as was first noted in Piggott’s 1962 article on “head and hoofs” burials. There is a long local tradition of these deposits in mortuary monuments in the South Caucasus across the Bronze Age. Archaeological investigations of Late Bronze Age sites in the Tsaghkahovit Plain have revealed that heads and hooves were also important outside of mortuary practices. This paper discusses the zooarchaeological evidence for the post-mortem circulation of cattle and caprine mandibles and tarsals within non-mortuary contexts at the sites of Gegharot and Tsaghkahovit. In doing so, I contextualize the "head and hoof" deposits and other structured depositions of animal remains in mortuary contexts within a wider suite of practices that circulated the heads and lower extremities of domesticated herd animals across the landscape and into graves and walled sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Divergent Paths, Shared Histories: Examining Archaeological Trends from the Caucasus to Mongolia

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52790