CONCLUSIONS

So how can we explain this mix and interplay of Chalcolithic traditions that stretched from the northern Caucasus to the Syro-Mesopotamian foothills?We have three distinctly recognisable traditions – Maikop, ChaffFaced Ware, and Sioni – emphasising the multicultural character of this period. Although their geographical borders were fluid and porous, they can nonetheless be associated with distinct cultural provinces. Maikop spreads across the Kuban region of the north Caucasian piedmont, while in the southern part of south Caucasia we find a concentration of Chaff-Faced Ware and the Ubaid-related tradition.The Sioni assemblage is at home in the central region of south Caucasia and along the middle Araxes Valley.

The most striking characteristic in both regions is the emergence of social inequality. In the northern region it is represented by the material wealth of the Maikop barrows. Copious quantities of precious metal items and semiprecious stones point to an authority that had the clout to access distant resources reaching from Mesopotamia to central Asia. Even mundane items like pottery point to connections further south, though the Maikop potters adapted the elements of the Chaff-Faced horizon. In the late phase, the Novosvobodnaia, when megalithic structures were used as burial architecture, cultural interaction extended north to the steppe region. That interplay occurred is beyond doubt; what remains to be determined is its nature and scale.

Communities in the southern Caucasus shared traits with their northern neighbours, also embracing a fledgling elite ideology, but on the whole took new social and economic trajectories at the beginning of the fifth millennium BC. The consumption of metals, for instance, did not develop uniformly, with the first half of the fourth millennium showing a much greater appetite for metalworking than did the second half of that millennium.220 Only in the third millennium did communities truly engage with metallurgy once more.

The cellular villages of the Neolithic, clustered on the low-lying plains, gave way to small settlements dispersed over a much wider area and at a range of altitudes. These Early Chalcolithic villages, represented largely by pits and the occasional semi-dugout dwelling, could be interpreted as more temporary in nature than their predecessors, though we need to be cautious, given the lack of detailed information on their economy.While their subsistence strategies appear to have been predominately pastoral, with a large complement of hunted animals suggesting a degree of risk management, we nonetheless have

220 Stöllner 2016.

petered out as a metallurgical centre around the end of the fifth millennium BC, a few centuries before the emergence of the Kuban region as a major metalworking node.223 This may not have been a coincidence, and has led to the idea that the centre of gravity in metalworking shifted from the so-called Carpatho-Balkan Metallurgical Province to the Circumpontic Metallurgical Province.224 There is certainly merit in this view.

223Kohl 2007.

224Chernykh 1992; Kohl 2007; Lyonnet 2007b.

CHAPTER 5

ENCOUNTERS BEYOND THE CAUCASUS : THE KURA - ARAXES CULTURE AND THE EARLY BRONZE AGE (350 0 – 240 0 BC)

A family feels exactly like an archipelago, separate but part of a whole and always drifting slowly apart.

(Matt King, The Descendants)

The musings of Matt King (George Clooney), the Honolulu-based lawyer in the film The Descendants, provide an apt metaphor both for a family and for the Kura-Araxes oikoumene – a vast culture province displaying unmistakable unity in portable material culture and aspects of domesticity, yet containing separate regional particularities that changed through time and across an extensive area north and east of Mesopotamia. These two faces of the Kura-Araxes – similarity and diversity – still pose a challenge for researchers.

The Kura-Araxes archaeological culture represents the remains of village communities of stockbreeders and farmers that in terms of social complexity may be best described as heterarchical. There is no evidence of rigid hierarchy or political centralisation. Instead, we have communities whose decision-making processes were collective and based on horizontal kinship networks. Emerging from the fuzziness of the Late Chalcolithic around 3500 BC, these south Caucasian groups stamped the following millennium with an imprint entirely their own.There are, of course, in reality no such things as separate periods, because one merges directly into the next, usually without a definite point of transition. But if ever the distinction between two periods denoted by convenient labels of this kind may be regarded as justified, it was now, when the Chalcolithic lifestyle was gradually ending and the Early Bronze Age, defined by the Kura-Araxes complex, was about to take shape.

Although the Kura-Araxes tradition lacks the monumentality and material richness of subsequent complexes, no other prehistoric archaeological culture of the southern Caucasus has captured the attention and imagination of

213

Figure 5.1. Map showing the full extent of the Kura-Araxes complex, as well as its heartland, compared to the geographical spread of the Uruk horizon (drawn by C. Jayasuriya).

archaeologists with quite the force of the Kura-Araxes ‘phenomenon’.There are three reasons for this attraction.

In the first instance, we are at once confronted with the great expanse of its geographical distribution, reaching well beyond the Kura-Araxes interfluve to which we can trace its roots. Variations of the tradition can be followed southward along the arc of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains, spreading down to the Amuq Plain on one side, and the Urmia basin through Godin Tepe to the Kangavar Plain on the other. Recent fieldwork in the areas south of the Caspian Sea down as far as the outskirts of Tehran and well beyond have added more sites to the culture province (Figure 5.1).This spread begs the question of what the reasons and stimuli were that prompted this diaspora. Second, there is the tradition’s longevity, puzzling as it is intriguing.With early manifestations evident around the mid-fourth millennium BC, the tradition continued to evolve for at least a millennium in most regions.

The third characteristic of the Kura-Araxes is its cultural ‘package’, a distinctive set of recurring traits, including a formalised use of domestic space fitted with standard elements such as hearths and benches; distinctive handmade pottery, often bearing regionally specific ornamentation and surface treatments; ceramic horned animal figurines; and a limited set of metal and stone items.1

1 Sagona and Zimansky 2009: 163–4.