Shifting Shores and Moving People: The Caspian in the Iron Age and Beyond

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 Caspian Sea is a fulcrum that shaped movement potentials at the western edge of the Eurasian Steppe. Either a small sea or the world’s largest salty lake, the Caspian is a complex space both ecologically and socially. The nature of the Caspian’s catchment and drainage systems mean that it is subject to extreme fluctuations in water levels, which can occur very quickly, as has happened repeatedly over the past several millennia. Its banks, which currently belong to five different countries, are stunningly diverse: from the Hyrcanian forests to the craggy Caucasus to the wide fertile plains of the Lower Volga.

Human interaction inside of and with the wider Caspian system, however, has been critically understudied. This, I argue, is a relic of Russian Imperial perspectives on Eurasia, combined with disciplinary divides and the contemporary geopolitical challenges. In this paper, I consider approaches to the Caspian in both past and present research about Iron Age and first millennium CE civilizations along its banks. I focus particularly on the question of human mobility and explore how we can better understand human activity in this key connective zone.

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): 52799