(ca. 40 per cent), the subsequent periods reflect a marked increase in caprines, peaking at over 80 per cent in Period VIA.This dependency on caprines was largely not affected after the centralised palace economy collapsed. The killoff patterns at Arslantepe VIA and VIB have been interpreted as reflecting a production system focused on meat and probably wool. It remains unclear, however, how such a specialised economy could have been maintained within two vastly different economic systems.

These comparative sketches indicate that Kura-Araxes stock-keepers did not have a uniform management system. Instead, it appears that pastoralism across the Kura-Araxes region is more complex and varied than we have realised. Even though the sample is small, the production systems do not conform to any apparent patterns according to environmental setting, chronology, or even socio-political organisation. Hence, high mountainous sites (Sos Höyük and Gegharot) do not share close similarities, whereas sites situated at different altitudes (Gegharot and Mokhra Blur) do. Likewise, settlements with markedly different socio-political systems (ArslantepeVIA andVIB) have relatively close herding strategies.

Agricultural Practices

In contrast to the decades of rigorous and systematic archaeobotanical studies in the Near East, the sampling of macro-botanical (as opposed to palynological) remains as a means of informing a range of issues from ancient diets through crop choice to land use and subsistence economies have only just begun in the Caucasus. For the Kura-Araxes period, we have some thirty sites that have reported macro-remains, but of these only the handful that have been investigated recently provide the type of detailed information that is requisite for informed conclusions. The most detailed information we have comes from Armenia. Unlike the Chalcolithic period, when various species of cereal, pulses, and oil-plant were farmed, the Kura-Araxes communities preferred more specialised agricultural practices focusing on a restricted range of cereals.228

Two-rowed and six-rowed hulled barley was the crop most cultivated by farmers, as vividly attested by the thousands of in situ grains preserved in jars at Gegharot and Aparan III.Virtually all the wheat crops were also cultivated, with einkorn recorded only in very small quantities. Other cereals include rye and broomcorn millet, pointing to some form of mixed agriculture.The ratio of wheat to barley appears to be altitude-specific, leading Hovsepyan to conclude that,‘the higher the elevation of the site the more the ratio of hulled ley is over wheat and vice versa’.229

228Hovsepyan 2015. See also Hovsepyan and Willcox 2008; Longford et al. 2009; Kakhiani et al. 2013: 40–48; Messager et al. 2015.

229Hovsepyan 2015: 77.