Sovereignty, mobility, and political cartographies in Late Bronze Age southern Caucasia

Investigating the spatial organisation of Bronze and Iron Age fortress complexes in the South Caucasus

“…In summary, the data gathered from the current project reveal more about the organisation and growth of Late Bronze to Early Iron Age fortress communities in the South Caucasus than about the emergence of larger towns and cities in the late first millennium BC. Indeed, there is a growing corpus of work suggesting that settlement aggregation and the growth of fortress settlements resulted in communities that were distinct from the traditional Near Eastern urban model (Smith 2005: 230; Lindsay & Greene 2013; for a slightly different perspective, see Hammer 2014: 758–59). Certainly, Late Bronze to Early Iron Age population aggregation differs in key ways from Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Mesopotamian urbanism.…”

Using the ArcGIS Collector Mobile App for Settlement Survey Data Collection in Armenia

“…The mobile GIS data collection method described here was developed in the context of the Kasakh Valley Archaeological Survey (KVAS), an NSF-funded project entailing intensive and extensive settlement survey, aerial mapping, and test excavations in the upper Kasakh River valley of north-central Armenia. The KVAS settlement survey began in 2014 as an initiative of the joint Armenian-American Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS), which since 1998 has engaged in long-term investigations into the origins, maintenance, and collapse of ancient complex polities in the region (Badalyan et al 2020; Lindsay and Greene 2013; Smith 2012; Smith et al 2009). Building on the results of ArAGATS's settlement survey of the Tsaghkahovit Plain in 1998 and 2000 (Smith et al 2009) and subsequent excavations at Bronze and Iron Age fortified sites on the plain (Badalyan et al 2008, 2014), our more recent survey was designed to provide a robust comparative data set from the neighboring Kasakh River valley through a holistic, systematic pedestrian survey of occupation phases spanning the Paleolithic through the Soviet era (Figure 1).…”

Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the Archaeology of Empires

“…On the Late Bronze Age occupation of the plain, see Badalyan et al (forthcoming); Badalyan et al (2008); Greene (2013); Lindsay (2006Lindsay ( , 2011Lindsay and Greene (2013); Lindsay et al (2008); Marshall (2014); A. T. Smith (2012,2015).…”