The chronology of the Maikop culture in the Northern Caucasus: changing perspectives

The aim of this article is to highlight the social and cultural developments that took place in the Southern Caucasus during the Early Bronze Age. Between 3500 and 2500 BC ca., new pottery, architectural and metallurgical traditions, known collectively as Kura-Araxes, new settlement forms in the mountain regions and new funerary customs emerged. Examining these changes, the article draws a picture of the organization of the Early Bronze Age communities in the Southern Caucasus societies centering primarily on the household and horizontal kinship relationships. We argue that this model was radically different from those of the vertically organized societies of Southern Mesopotamia and Northern Caucasus. Finally, the paper focuses on the changing role of metals towards the mid-third millennium BC and that, by causing radical social transformations, also brought to an end the Kura-Araxes traditions.

2018

We present a brief archaeological summary of the main phases of cultural<br> and social change in the Western, Central, and South Asia ca. 4000-1500 BCE<br> as a contextual framework for the findings presented in Damgaard et al.<br> 2018. We stress the role of the Caucasus as a conduit in Western Asia linking<br> the steppe and Eastern Europe with Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. We track<br> the emergence of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in<br> Central Asia as a cultural melting pot between the steppe and the sown<br> lands during a period of more than a millennium. And we highlight indicators<br> of cultural and commercial exchange, tracking developments in technology<br> as well as social and political organization that came about as part of<br> complex processes of interaction in a region stretching from South Asia to<br> the Mediterranean.

Interpretation of the data which is currently available for the populations of the Steppe and the adjacent North Caucasus areas during the Bronze Age has enabled the analysis and reconstruction that follows. From this time onwards the way of life of the population that manufactured goods, weapons, tools and organized other aspects of its economic and also cultural products is reflected in pastoral movements from the south, i.e. the North Caucasus, to the north, i.e. the Steppe, and vice versa. The reasons for such movements might have included climate change, seasonal economic cycles, the necessity to control the exploited areas and the development of cross-cultural links, including marriages. During such movements different population groups developed their relationships in a mutually enriching fashion. With new data we are able to produce not only generalized reconstructions of the prehistoric pastoral societies inhabiting these two regions, but also gain insights into individual lives, so that personal stories begin to emerge.

Japanese Journal of Archaeology, 2021

Scholars have long been aware of the interaction and migration sweeping across the vastness of the Eurasian Steppes in the Bronze Age, but the historical significance of individual cases of interaction has not been clear. This study demonstrates the major qualitative change that took place in interactions in the Steppes immediately before the emergence of the Scytho-Siberian culture and presents a new theory of interaction to replace the monistic/pluralistic approach.

The Caucasus. Bridge between the urban centres in Mesopotamia and the Pontic steppes in the 4th and 3rd millennium BC. The transfer of knowledge and technologies between East and West in the Bronze Age. L. Giemsch, S. Hansen (Ed.).2021. Proceedings of the Caucasus conference, Frankfurt am Main,

This paper presents the results of the study of a Maikop Culture surface tomb of the so far unknown type preceding the dolmen structure in mound 1 excavated by Nikolaĭ I. Veselovskiĭ near the village of Tsarskaya in 1898, Northwest Caucasus. The tomb was a surface structure with dry stone walls, a pebble-paved and clay-covered floor with wooden beams around the perimeter, and a clay roof. The facade of the tomb with the entrance was framed as a shallow portal. According to the obtained radiocarbon dates, the twin interment in the tomb was made between 3300 and 3100 BC. A number of the attributes of the tomb structure indicate its similarity, in addition to the Tsarskaya dolmens, also to the Maikop Culture interments in pits and surface tombs. These data help clarify the general evolution trajectory of the funeral rites of the Maikop Culture

2012

Conference: Union Institute Graduate School Seminar Series, at UIGS Colloquium: “The Archaeology of the Eurasian Steppe, January 21, 1998

This paper begins as a critical review of the archaeology of the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age Eurasian steppe, primarily in seeking the distinctions of its postulated horse-riding nomadic inhabitants known variously as Cimmerians, Scythians, Sauromatians, Sarmatians, Saka, Alans, etc., within a dialogue of what defines archaeological evidence as opposed to historical evidence and the problem of conflating one with the other. Eschewing historical labels, archaeological evidence alone for LBA/EIA Eurasian steppe cultures has been primarily based on recognizing artefacts and ecofacts as assumed remnants of a pastoral nomadic adaptation to the steppe environment; however, such a presupposition requires reflection on how a nomadic lifeway may be ascertained with any degree of confidence from a particular residue of material culture and ecofacts. In addressing this question, the paper veers into a discussion of pastoral nomadism itself, whether it exists independent of other modes of subsistence, and if it can be specifically identified among the cultural and environmental residue constituting a particular archaeological site. From this question, the argument proceeds to a critical understanding of archaeology itself, its goals, its areas of expertise, its theoretical principles, its methods of discovery and evaluation, its relationship to anthropology and history, its strengths and limitations, and how archaeology may be identified as a distinct academic discipline.

The given article is devoted to characteristic features of material factors that can be used in justifying a nomadic life-style of the population that manufactured relevant goods, weapons, tools and that organized its economic and cultural production in accordance with natural and ecological possibilities of its habitat. Nomadic traits are most easily established on the basis of the following factors: a means of using draught animals (teaming bulls and bullocks in a wagon-transportable house); a wide use of nomadic herding economy products in the production (sheep wool, bones of relevant animals are main types of raw materials); a character of small ceramic forms that practically do not change their technological and typological characteristics; a degree of spread and a specific weight of leather and felt products in relevant cultures, they are reflected in real samples and in tools (special knifes for cutting leather and felt, and, on a greater scope, versatile tools for cutting animal carcasses); organization of nomadic houses heating in the conditions of constant fuel shortages (a use of censers on legs and their varieties). A great degree of technical culture compactness and a transfer of techniques, shapes and ornamentation characteristics of goods from one sphere of production to another are typical for the whole technology of nomadic cultures of the region. A particular attitude to the recovery and spread of metallic (metallurgic) raw materials was a specific feature of the nomadic environment of the given region, this fact making a specific imprint on the improvement of technology for digging, underground, mining work conducted by these tribes. Due to a well developed herding economy, nomads not only occupied sparsely populated ecological niches in the steppe where the agricultural population could develop only sectors of river valleys and river basins full of water, but also became a transparent medium for a spread of experience and skills in metallurgy, strengthening cultural, economic and spiritual, ritual links between synchronous groups that settled in large territories. The article has been stipulated by a necessity to emphasize the factors of cultural, production and spiritual closeness that was developed due to a unification of the nomadic life-style. Other aspects of the processes linked with an extensive settlement in the steppes during the Bronze Age, namely, ethnocultural characteristics of various groups, a possibility of the ethnic population formation, new principles of the territorial and ethno-social (including family) division of the population were just mentioned. It is understandable as differentiating processes could be connected to a greater extent with changes in the political situation and historical events taking place both in the steppes and the environment (forests, deserts, mountains), while integrating processes, a leveling of demographic environment are more closely related to ecological constants of the region, against the background of which the isolation of sharp demarcation lines stable in space and time that existed between close groups of population of the single ecological niche can outline the territories controlled by the population that belongs to different linguistic macro-families. In the region under consideration, factors for such observations have not been fully systematized, and it is this direction of investigation that can provide a justification in the form of facts for the resolution of the Indo-European issue. Research approaches that have been available for a long period of time are not sufficient for a definite narrowing of the study to establish a common homeland of the Indo-Europeans, the stages and specific directions and succession of their settlement. There is only one thing that is clear: the culture of the North Indo-Aryans is a local, later manifestation of a relevant ethnolinguistical stratum, deformed by innovations introduced to all spheres of life of the given population due to the appearance of war chariots drawn by horses that resulted in a new strategy of aggressive wars that support and strengthen the processes of extended (migrational) settlements.

Ancient Interactions: East and …, 2002