Jugha: How Story Mapping Can Reveal Landscape Structural Violence

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Old Jugha, located in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan, was once a prosperous ancient Armenian city with its famous cemetery filled with Khachkars in the borderlands between two adversarial empires, the Ottoman and Persian. Jugha suffered three periods of destruction over three centuries, which have been supported and supplemented through the utilization of historical narratives and eyewitness accounts. The first period was in 1604-1605 by the forced removal of the population and subsequent vandalism of the city by Shah Abbas I’s troops. From 1903 to 1904, during the second period, the Oulukhanlu-Julfa Railway used rubble from the town and khachkars as fill to level the path. The third and final period occurred between 1998-2006, with the complete erasure of the site by the Azerbaijani government. Using an ethnohistorical approach to landscape archaeology and 21st-century technology, an erased site can be revived through story mapping and community engagement. Furthermore, using these digital techniques and ethnographic and ethnohistorical evidence, theoretical frameworks such as landscape structural violence can be visualized and applied to these destructive state acts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53635