Late Bronze Age power dynamics in southern Caucasia: A community perspective on political landscapes

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Late Bronze Age power dynamics in southern Caucasia: A community perspective on political landscapes "
Ian C. Lindsay K. Schreiber

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	52412
Doc. No	:	TL22366
Call number	:	‭3245914‬
Main Entry	:	Ian C. Lindsay
Title & Author	:	Late Bronze Age power dynamics in southern Caucasia: A community perspective on political landscapes\ Ian C. Lindsay
College	:	University of California, Santa Barbara
Date	:	2006
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2006
Page No	:	436
Abstract	:	The mechanics of political leadership and the ways in which it manifests and reproduces itself---from the establishment of constituency allegiance to the production of entire landscapes of authority---have become prominent foci of study among social scientists in recent decades. In southern Caucasia (a territory encompassing the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia), the Late Bronze Age (1500-1150 BC) witnessed fundamental sociopolitical transformations that are most visible in changes to how authority was monumentalized in the built environment. Ostentatious burial mounds characteristic of the hierarchically organized nomadic pastoralists of the Middle Bronze Age (2200-1500 B.C.) are replaced by cyclopean stone hilltop fortresses as the most prominent materialization of power. Dozens of LBA fortresses have been documented in Armenia since the early twentieth century, but the social consequences of these sociopolitical landscapes have only recently come under sustained investigation. The data for this dissertation were collected through excavations at a lower town at the base of a Late Bronze Age fortress in the Tsaghkahovit Plain in northwestern Armenia and through ceramic circulation study based on the chemical characterization of raw clay materials and archaeological ceramics. As the first intensive look at Late Bronze Age settled life, the goals of the excavation were to define the architectural form of the lower town, document the periodization and domestic activities reflected in site assemblages and residues, and explore the economic and political relations between the lower town and the fortress citadel. Excavations confirm that the lower town occupants were engaged in a mixed agro-pastoral economy in an occupation contemporary to the fortress citadel and other fortresses on the plain. The ceramic circulation study, based on instrumental neutron activation analysis, indicated that ceramics at Tsaghkahovit were produced almost exclusively from local clay, suggesting a striking level of economic insularity in both the fortress lower town and the citadel. I discuss how this may reflect efforts by fortress elites to restrict exchange and break the social networks that existed among mobile societies during the earlier period, and how local communities responded in the face of these new social, political, and economic conditions.
Subject	:	Social sciences; Armenia; Azerbaijan; Bronze Age; Caucasia; Community; Georgia (Republic); Political landscapes; Power dynamics; Republic of Georgia; Archaeology; 0324:Archaeology
Added Entry	:	K. Schreiber
Added Entry	:	University of California, Santa Barbara