Archaeological Excavations on the SCPX Pipeline, Azerbaijan 2013-2018

Abstract

The SCPX pipeline, completed in 2018, follows the line of the earlier BTC and SCP pipelines across Azerbaijan towards Georgia. The project included an archaeological programme that supplemented the discoveries of the earlier two projects. The results were very similar, but were significantly different from the earlier work. The SCPX work was carried out on 48 locations using a team of national and international archaeologists. Chalcolithic material was again found at Poylu, Xocaxan and Aılı Dərə. The Kura Araz culture of the early Bronze Age was indicated with burials at Soyuqbulaq and Tovuzçay. The Xocalı-Gədəbəy culture of the late Bronze Age early Iron Age is well represented with a cemetery found at Tovuzçay II and the kurgans at Borsunlu Camp. Antique period jar grave cemeteries were found in the Yevlax area at Əmirarx, Bəyimsarov, Səmədabad and Yaldili. Medieval settlement sites were excavated at Əmirarx, Faxrali, Lək and Hacialili. The major discovery of the project was the medieval castle at Kərpiclitəpə. This was a rectangular structure with towers at each corner and evidence of occupation that probably ended with the Mongol invasion. The report is structured as an introduction to the project, with a brief summary of excavations. The detail for each site can be accessed in the report by links to the archive on the ADS website in a similar form to the BTC/SCP project report. The reader can thus access all the information for each site together with detailed analysis of radiocarbon and other analyses of the sites for all the work in that area from the various projects. Taken as a whole, the work on the three projects provides a means to comprehend part of the very broad early history of northwest Azerbaijan.

Insights into ancient ceramic technology: a comprehensive analysis of mineralogy, chemistry and firing conditions

“…The Baku Tbilisi Ceyhan oil pipeline (BTC) construction took three years. It was in 2005 and was preceded by an archaeological program that began in 2001 and ended in 2009 with a series of reports (Lyonnet et al, 2008(Lyonnet et al, , 2012(Lyonnet et al, , 2016Lyonnet & Guliyev, 2010;Herrscher et al, 2018;Palumbi et al, 2018;Maynard et al, 2022) data and subsequent studies. A detailed map of the research area is provided elsewhere (Nishiaki et al, 2019a).…”