New light on the Late Prehistory of the South Caucasus: Data from the recent excavation campaings at Kültepe I in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan (2012-2018)

Abstract

This article discusses the results of a new round of excavations that have been carried out on the famous site of Kültepe I in Nakhchivan by a French-Azerbaijani team (2012-2018). After comparing the stratigraphy set up by the Soviet archaeologists during the 1950s with the occupation levels recently brought to light, the authors discuss the neolithisation processes of the Caucasus by comparing the data of Kültepe I with those of other Neolithic sites excavated in the Araxes or Kura basins: it appears that the adoption of a productive economy in the South Caucasus probably results from several events, including the migrations of peoples from Iran and Mesopotamia. The authors also analyse the data obtained from the Kura-Araxes levels, which, together with the assemblages collected by the Soviet archaeologists, show that the human group that settled at Kültepe I in the last quarter of the 4th millennium, is culturally distinct from those living in the vicinity, in particular from the group living at Kültepe II, where Late 4th millennium Kura-Araxes occupation levels are also attested.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.