The Early Bronze Age in Azerbaijan in the light of recent discoveries

Abstract

L’article concerne l’âge du Bronze ancien en Azerbaïdjan, période au cours de laquelle a commencé puis s’est développée la culture Kura-Araxe. Les fouilles anciennes sur des établissements et des tombes ou kourganes de cette culture manquent souvent de repères stratigraphiques et de dates précises. Les sites les plus importants sont revus ici sur la base de fouilles récentes faites à Mentesh Tepe : après une longue occupation remontant jusqu’au Néolithique, trois phases du Bronze ancien ont été mises en évidence (de la seconde moitié du 4e à la seconde moitié du 3e millénaire). La première phase correspond à une tombe collective sous kourgane, la deuxième à de nombreuses fosses et la troisième à une tombe à char à quatre roues en bois assez riche, datée de la phase Martkopi de la «culture des Premiers Kourganes » . Cette dernière phase est contemporaine de la dernière séquence de la culture Kura-Araxe et l’on estime qu’elle est liée au développement d’un commerce «international » , basé principalement sur l’étain. L’absence d’établissement visible sur une large étendue de l’Azerbaïdjan occidental conduit l’auteur à considérer que la population était probablement mobile pendant toute cette longue période.

The Early Bronze Age of the Southern Caucasus

“…On the other hand, around 3500-3400 BC other communities had a radically different ceramic tradition from those of the Late Chalcolithic period. There is evidence of this new ceramic tradition as early as the mid-fourth millennium BC in different regions of the Southern Caucasus, from the western shores of the Caspian Sea (Velikent in Daghestan) to the plains of western Azerbaijan (the kurgans from Mentesh Tepe and Uzun Rama) to the Kura River valley (Berikldeebi level IV) as far as the Ararat plain (Avan and Norabats) (Kohl and Magomedov, 2014;Lyonnet, 2014;Badalyan, 2014). Unfortunately, the present documented situation on the 3600-3350 BC time frame is still too fragmentary and only allows us to roughly hypothesize some of the factors at play in what will result in a process of radical cultural and social change.…”

“…Links between Chalcolithic and Kura-Araxes traditions can be detected also in the persistence of circular monocellular architecture throughout the second half of the fourth millennium BC, as recorded at Beerikldebi IV and Khizanaant Gora E in Shida Kartli (Djavakhishvili, 1998;Kikvidze, 1972), Norabats and Mokhra Blur in the Ararat plain, and at Kultepe-Nakhicevan (Areshian, 2007;Kushnareva, 1997). Finally, traits of continuity are represented by the funerary tradition of the kurgans, which appeared during the first half of the fourth millennium BC and that continued to be widely used during the second half of the fourth millennium BC (Lyonnet, 2014;. These elements of hybridization and continuity may suggest that some Chalcolithic communities, or eventually some of their components, may have represented the sociocultural milieu that incubated elements that later developed as part of the "Kura-Araxes" traditions.…”

“…These earthen kurgans-with their preserved wooden-log funerary chambers containing wheeled wagons (Djaparidze, 2003;Makharadze and Murvanidze, 2014;Lyonnet, 2014) and rich funerary inventories composed of skillfully crafted golden and silver artifacts, arsenical copper, and tin-bronze objects (Chernykh, 1992;Carminati, 2014)-are paradigmatic of the radical changes in the region. While the focus on land as a primary resource for agro-pastoral activities was a pillar of the socioeconomic organization of the Kura-Araxes communities, the symbolic presence of wheeled vehicles in the new kurgans emphasizes the importance of mobility, which is not only the result of a new focus on a pastoral economy but presumably also a fundamental prerequisite to connect with routes of communication and trade networks focused on metals (Lyonnet, 2014;Smith, 2015).…”