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A PRE-POTTERY NEOLITHIC?
The interlude between the readily identifiable assemblages of the Mesolithic and the Pottery Neolithic is not easy to determine.This uncertainty derives from the disturbed contexts of what are assumed to be Pre-Pottery Neolithic deposits, fragmentary evidence that is almost entirely based on stone tools typology, and an absence of chronometric dates.11 Furthermore, we have no built structures, nor any systematically collected samples of animal bones and botanical remains.There are two regions that we need to consider: the central and southern Caucasus, and western Georgia and the Black Sea.
In the south Caucasus, studies on the Pre-Pottery Neolithic largely involve obsidian tools collected from open settlements on the shores of Lake Paravani, the rock shelter at Dmanisi, and sites of the Nagutni horizon located in southern Ossetia.12 To this can be added the material collected on the Tsalka Plateau and more recently from the Kmlo-2 rock shelter in western Armenia.13 The Nagutni sites – Nagutni I, Nagutni II, Zura-Akho, and Jijoeti – were first studied in the 1960s by Liubin, who attributed these one-period sites to the very end of the Mesolithic (or ‘Proto-Neolithic’), largely based on the absence of ceramics, polished tools, querns and mortars, and sickle hafts.14 Although we now know these are not legitimate criteria by which to define the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, they did serve to place the assemblages in roughly the right timeframe.The stone industry is overwhelmingly one of flake tools; parallel-sided blades are very much in the minority (Figure 3.2). Especially characteristic are scrapers and hooked tools, used as burins or spoke shaves, struck off conical and flattened cores. Both scrapers and hooked tools display considerable re-working. Squamous or parallel retouching was applied to both surfaces, but predominately on the bulbular side.15
Connections in typology and production techniques have been drawn between the Nagutni lithics and the even earlier Mesolithic assemblages on the one hand, and the chipped stone industry of the Paluri group in western Georgia on the other. Each group has side scrapers, hooked tools, sideretouched blades and ‘Kukreki’ sickle blades (Figure 3.2). Collectively, the tools also display a high degree of re-touch, generally applied to the lower half. Even so, significant differences are apparent. The Mesolithic tool kit is essentially microlithic and its blades were struck off fl at, prismatic, and conical cores.This stands in contrast to Nagutni-Paluri fl ake industry that has also been found in the Kavtura river valley near Tsikhiagora.16
11Rostunov et al. 2009: 67–9 questions the evidence for a Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the southern Caucasus.
12Liubin 1966; Kikodze and Koridze 1978; Gogelia 1982.
13Kiguradze and Menabde 2004: 352;Arimura et al. 2009, 2010.
14Liubin 1966.
15Liubin 1966: 163.
16Chelidze 1990.
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Figure 3.2. Comparative stone tools from Çayönü, Kmlo-2, and Georgia (after Arimura et al. 2010).
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Paravani I and Shaori have a different character. Both are located very close to rich obsidian sources, and the amount of splinters made from rejuvenation cores suggests that they are probably workshops. Paravani I is a large rock shelter (ca. 18 m x 7 m) with an obsidian tool kit of geometric microliths and retouched blades, whereas Shaori, on the Tsalka Plateau, is distinguished by many massive fl akes, segmented tools fashioned from large blades, and a variety of piercing and incising tools. Different again is the Dmanisi rock shelter assemblage, which includes conical cores, a variety of blades and scrapers, and chisel-like tools, but only a few microliths.The technique of consecutive blunting and sub-parallel blunting found at the Paravani and the Paluri-Nagutni sites is a feature they share with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites in the Near East such as Çayönü Tepesi in south-east Anatolia and Tell Magzalia in Iraq.
The recent reports on Kmlo-2 clarify this situation somewhat. It was occupied sporadically in the ‘Mesolithic/Early Neolithic’ over some 7,000 years: eleventh–tenth millennia, ninth–eighth millennia, and sixth–fifth millennia cal BC.17 The chipped stone industry was entirely manufactured from obsidian pebbles transported by river from the nearby Tsaghkunyats outcrop to the north, or nodules sourced from deposits further afield to the east. Geometric microliths feature prominently in the tool kit, especially lunates, backed blades and scalene bladelets (Figure 3.2). The excavators also draw attention to the so-called Kmlo tool, characterised by pressure fl aking along the retouched edges, which recalls the hooked implements reported in early studies from Georgia. Although radiocarbon readings place these tools within the same timeframe as the ‘Çayönü points’ found across south-eastern Anatolia and once thought to be the tradition from which Georgian ‘hooked tools’ derived, technological differences between the Çayönü points and the Kmlo-2 tools do not support the link.18 The Kmlo-2 tool appears to be a local invention of highland Armenia that emerged in the early ninth millennium BC and continued through the entire sequence to the fifth millennium, which is defined by Chalcolithic pottery sherds.
Whether or not Kmlo-2 had a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site is another matter. The absence of domesticated cereals and animal remains and the preponderance of wild species (ibex, moufflons, and deer), as well as the lack of ground stone tools and architecture, speaks of a Mesolithic rather than a Neolithic tradition.19 The fact that Kmlo-2 was occupied during the sixth–fifth millennia BC raises the intriguing possibility that certain pockets of the southern Caucasus harboured the co-existence of late Mesolithic hunter-forager and Neolithic villagers. Summing up, then, certain Georgian sites have a material culture that appears to differ from both the Trialetian Mesolithic and the Pottery Neolithic traditions, enough to warrant their provisional status as
17Arimura et al. 2010: 77.
18Kiguradze and Menabde 2004.
19Nishiaki et al. 2015: 281.
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transitional sites, but far more rigorous evidence and secure radiocarbon readings are wanting.20 Moreover, the Kmlo-2 evidence implies that the transition was most likely not uniform across the southern Caucasus.
Western Georgia
The situation in western Georgia and the Black Sea is even more elusive. Ironically, the site of Odishi, located on a plateau between the village of the same name (formerly Ledgebia) and Kortskheli, was the first settlement south of the Caucasus dubbed Neolithic. Aleksandr Kalandadze conducted excavations at Odishi in 1936 and Lamar Nebieridze later studied the material in more detail.21 Kalandadze discerned two layers – one layer belonging to the Mesolithic, and another layer attributed to the Neolithic. In the decades that followed, a welter of sites reputedly with Neolithic occupation levels was reported: Urta, Kistriki, Mamati, Sagvardzhile, Anaseuli, and many more besides (Figure 3.1).22 Very soon, chronological schemes began to proliferate. Without any chronometric dates to anchor them, the material culture derived from thin and poorly differentiated deposits, in some cases disturbed, soon took on the appearance of a slippery and fugitive tradition.
One scheme, proposed by Aleksandr Formozov, argued for a transition from the earlier Mesolithic to pottery-producing and fully fledged farming societies.23 Nebieridze, too, divided the Neolithic of western Georgia into two phases, but saw no Mesolithic archaisms. Her Early Neolithic includes Odishi, Kistriki, Anaseuli I, and Nizhnyaya Shilovka II, which were followed by the so-called Sochi-Adler group of the Late Neolithic.24 Grigola suggested yet another scheme.25 A reconnaissance across several geographic zones in western Georgia led him to distinguish between Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites, situated mainly along the coastal strip and in the foothills of the Rioni-Kvirila basin in central Colchis, and later and different ceramic-producing villages situated in the plain.To the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, attributed to the second half of the seventh millennium BC, he assigns the open settlements at Tkaia-Lebiqvi and Paluri (Tsalenjikha), and the Darkveti rock shelter.26 Charred cereal grains were reported, as well as the occasional bones of domesticated cattle and
20Kozlowski 1996.
21Kalandadze 1939; Nebieridze 1972.
22For a history of research on the Neolithic in western Georgia, see Meshveliani 2013: 61–2.
23Formozov 1965.
24Nebieridze 1972: 108–18; 1986.
25Dzhavakhishvili 1971; Grigolia 1977. See also Kiguradze and Menabde 2004: 349–51; and K. S. Kalandadze (1984: 19), who splits the Pre-Pottery Phase into an Early and Middle Neolithic.
26Grigolia 1977; Nebieridze 1978.
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sheep/goat, but the circumstances of their discovery are problematic.27 Apart from Kamenomostkaya Cave in the north-west Caucasus, where the Upper Palaeolithic level is covered by a Neolithic deposit, these sites are open-air settlements.28 Yet no evidence of structures has come to light apart from light post structures with a stone hearth in the centre reported from Kistriki, where charred cereals (not identified) were recovered in a pit.29 Pebbles with two grooves (sinkers) might suggest fishing also formed part of the economy.
Not everyone was convinced by these arguments.Aleksandr Dzhavakhishvili was the first to express scepticism, contending that the sub-tropical environment of the Colchian lowlands would not have been conducive to early farming.30 Although Nebieridze does not see humid climate as a restrictive factor for an agricultural economy, she does admit that the heavy rainfall and erosion have not been favourable to the preservation of bones and other organic matter. Environmental factors aside, it is the insecure contexts that have made it difficult to assess the situation. Nizhnyaya Shilovka, Odishi, Kistriki, and Anaseuli II, for instance, have later material mixed in their single cultural and supposedly Pre-Pottery deposits.31
Despite these concerns, other researchers have had little choice but to follow these findings.32 It is with this confusing situation in mind that Tengiz Meshveliani conducted a series of exploratory trenches in 2008–10 at a number of key sites – Anaseuli I, Gurianta, Urta, Kobuleti, Odishi, and Paluri – to test the veracity and nature of the western Georgian Neolithic.33 His results are as startling as they are revealing. None of the sites, Meshveliani maintains, produced evidence that could be considered permanent.These are temporary stations represented by finds scattered thinly across the surface, with only a few items embedded in a thin layer (ca. 3–5 cm) of topsoil.
Furthermore, the lithics from Anaseuli I, Khutsubani, and Kobuleti bear no similarities to known Neolithic industries, and instead fit comfortably within the late Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic traditions. Overwhelmingly manufactured from Chikiani obsidian, stone tools include geometric microliths, scrapers, and burins.The only items that reflect a Neolithic character are the few polished tools from Odishi, which herald a new technology. Even so, these findings do not explain the grit-tempered ceramics, some with incised and serrated lips that foreshadow Sioni ware, discussed in Chapter 4.34 The
27Solov’ev 1967.
28On Kamenomostkaya cave, see Formozov 1965.
29Solov’ev 1967.
30Dzhavakhishvili 1973: 14–15.
31Meshveliani 2013.
32Kiguradze and Menbade 2004; Sagona 2010; Kohl and Trifonov 2014.
33Meshveliani 2013: 62–70.
34Nebieridze 1972, 1987. I would like to thank Lamara Nebieridze for showing me a selection of these ceramics.