With the Soviet collapse at the end of the 1980s, archaeology came to a complete halt. But the violent convulsions of the 20th century-two world wars, the Russian Revolution, and the establishment of the Soviet Union, which annexed the region in the 1920s-held research to a minimum. Scholars had long recognized the importance of the Caucasus in the saga of human history. They have barely scratched the surface, he says: “The number of obsidian implements here from different periods, from the Paleolithic to the Bronze and Iron Ages, is impossible to count. Gasparyan and his Armenian associates, along with their American, Japanese, and European collaborators, have harvested thousands of Paleolithic tools at Arteni and other local sites. Their successors mined the same materials up to 1000 B.C.E. Active production is thought to date back to the Lower Stone Age, when the region’s first skilled artisans were early Neanderthals. Its products have been traced north over the Caucasus to present-day Ukraine and west across Anatolia to the Aegean, almost 1,600 miles away.Įstimates of Arteni’s output are staggering. Countless blades, hand axes, scrapers, chisels, arrowheads, and spearheads produced at the mountainside “factory” circulated over a vast exchange network that long precedes the oldest recorded instances of formal trade.Įquipped with new technology that can precisely identify the origin of obsidian tools-even down to a single lava vein in a specific volcano-scientists have come to believe that Arteni was a central component in what amounts to a far-reaching Paleolithic arms industry. “We are looking at the remains of a gigantic open-air workshop,” says archaeologist Boris Gasparyan of Armenia’s National Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |