4 Mobility, Territorial Commitments, and Political Organization among Late Bronze Age Polities in Southern Caucasia

Abstract

In this case study of territoriality in Armenia's Late Bronze Age Tsaghkahovit Plain we examine land claims and political relations among fortified communities with highly varied subsistence and economic practices, including mobile pastoralism. Integral to political relations between fortress-based institutions and mobile subjects was the need to create highly legible places for political subjection, authorization, and action. However, the same social, political, economic, and religious institutions that help elucidate the spatial dimensions of politics in the LBAshrines, workshops, storage spaces, cemeteries-also demonstrate that political claims and commitments to land did not likely resemble the neat borders of absolutist cartographies essential to modern nation-states. We detail potential models of territorial organization that incorporate the strategies of rule and socioeconomic dynamics derived from a decade of archaeological survey and excavation on the plain by Project ArAGATS. [mobility, complex polities, land, landscape, political economy]

Gateway to theYayla: The Varneti Archaeological Complex in the Southern Caucasus Highlands

“…Related to ideas of political authority are questions surrounding the agro-pastoral economy. Investigations in Armenia have found LBA fortified sites clustered in foothills on the edges of arable plains, allowing fortress-based polities to control agricultural land (Smith et al, 2009: 396; Hammer, 2014), although this may have taken the form of remotely monitoring access rather than direct surveillance (Greene & Lindsay, 2013: 64–65). The LBA settlement at Tsaghkahovit South Lower Town, for example, is characterized as a ‘domestic complex occupied intermittently by seasonally mobile groups’ (Badalyan et al, 2014: 193–98), albeit with access to fields for growing crops.…”

“…Most ceramics from the mid-second millennium context at Varneti profile are domestic and utilitarian vessels rather than the decorated objects from the kurgan burials which allowed archaeologists in the twentieth century to identify a ‘Meskhetian variation of the Trialeti culture’ in the district between Zveli and Vardzia (Kakhiani et al, 2013: 4). The thick-walled storage and cooking vessels and animal bones suggest a semi-sedentary, pastoralist population, a significant result for understanding the transition from settled and agrarian to nomadic pastoral farming in the MBA of southern Caucasia (Greene & Lindsay, 2013: 56).…”

“…Survey on the ground has been effective in documenting the distribution of fortified places, which has led to sophisticated interpretations of political authority and territorial sovereignty, for example, examining whether groups of nearby fortresses belonged to a single political authority, whether they operated as individual polities, or were configured into various allied groupings (Smith et al, 2009: 395–97; Greene & Lindsay, 2013: 58). At a regional scale, fortified places have often been explained as elements of coordinated strategic systems (Lindsay, 2011; Hammer, 2014).…”

“…Episodic yet long-term occupation is a characteristic of Eurasian fortified places, particularly those used by mobile, agro-pastoral groups (Kiani, 1982: 21; Omrani Rekavand et al, 2008: 162–63; Negus Cleary, 2015: 156–57; 2017: 289, 293–95). Even for LBA fortresses in Armenia that have been studied in detail, there are no singular, strategic explanations for their location, size, and layout, and the activities associated with the political and religious elites who inhabited them (Greene & Lindsay, 2013).…”

Everyday Cosmopolitanisms

“…18. The Tsaghkahovit plain has hosted a long sequence of archaeological investigations, most recently including those affiliated with the Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (ArAGATS); see Smith, Badalyan, and Avetisyan 2005;Smith et al 2003Smith et al , 2009Badalyan, Smith, and Khatchadourian 2018;Lindsay and Smith 2006, Greene and Lindsay 2013, Lindsay 2006Khatchadourian 2016;Greene 2012;Marshall 2014;Chazin 2016. This body of work has authoritatively framed the landscapes of Aragatsotn for prehistoric and classical periods.…”