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The South Caucasus occupies the divide between ancient Mesopotamia and prehistoric Europe, and was thus crucial in the development of Old World societies. Chronologies for the region, however, have lacked the definition achieved in surrounding areas. Concentrating on the Tsaghkahovit Plain of north-western Armenia, Project ArAGATS s multi-site radiocarbon dataset has now produced Bayesian modelling, which provides tight chronometric support for tracing the transmission of technology, population movement and social developments that shaped the Eurasian Bronze and Iron Ages.Keywords: South Caucasus, Armenia, Bronze Age, Iron Age, chronology, radiocarbon, IntroductionThe Caucasus is one of Eurasia's major archaeological 'fault lines' (Kavtaradze 2004: 539). It is a region where the dynamics of prehistoric Europe and the ancient Near East pressed gainst [...]

Scott C. Smith. Landscape and politics in the ancient Andes: biographies of place at Khonko Wankane. 2016. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. One of the more consequential intellectual transformations [...]

Archaeology has recently been described as a means of "bearing witness" through the recuperation of pasts forgotten and dismissed. But archaeology is also a tool for unseeing, creating voids in the historical record easily filled by state-sponsored polemics. In few places is this as clear as the Armenian Highland of eastern Turkey. The year 2020 marked the 105th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, a program of mass murder enacted by the collapsing Ottoman Empire that resulted in the deaths of up to 1.5 million people and the dislocation of almost the entire Armenian population of Anatolia. The genocide continues to define regional politics as a century of denial by the Turkish government strains international relations. Even as an increasingly vocal cadre of historians has grappled with the legacies of collective violence in the region, foreign archaeologists working in Turkey have increasingly avoided the material remains of the Armenian past and the evidence of its erasure, etching genocide denial into the authoritative discourse of the discipline. The disappearance of Armenians from international archaeological accounts of the region effectively co-opts the discipline as a functionary of the Turkish government's historical revisionism. This study combines close readings of works from international archaeology's archive with interviews with foreign archaeologists to better understand the discipline's understudied practices of unseeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E.E. KUZMINA, edited by VICTOR H. MAIR. The prehistory of the Silk Road. xii+248 pages, 72 figures, tables. 2008. Philadelphia (PA): University of Pennsylvania Press; 978-0-8122-4041-2 $65 & 42.50 £. [...]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.01.012 Byline: William D. Brown, Adam T. Smith, Brian Moskalik, Josh Gabriel Abstract: The function of aggressive signals, including both their information content and the circumstances under which they cause resolution or escalation of conflict, continues to be controversial. We studied the information content of aggressive songs in the house cricket, Acheta domesticus, to test their ability to inform opponents about fighting ability and motivation. We show that songs produced by individual males are highly repeatable and contain information about male resource holding potential, the ability of a male to win an aggressive contest. Temporal components of aggressive song were correlated with male body size, and size affected both the intensity and outcome of fights. In contrast, we found no components of song that signal motivation to fight. Although males with restricted access to mates were significantly more aggressive and won fights more often, their songs did not reflect the asymmetry in motivation to fight. We discuss possible reasons for the absence of signals of motivation during animal contests. Author Affiliation: Department of Biology, State University of New York at Fredonia, U.S.A. Article History: Received 4 May 2005; Revised 15 July 2005; Accepted 19 January 2006 Article Note: (miscellaneous) MS. number: A10149R

Urartian representations of the built environment are discussed in relation to the aesthetic of political legitimacy. Topics include the Urartian Empire, aesthetics and legitimacy, epigraphic representations, pictorial representations, and transcendent aesthetics of blessing and conquest.

Michael Foucault's genealogies, which depend on the Nietzschean account of the violent origin of human culture, present a debatable description of the innate struggle in the emergence of human domination. Dawkin's parallel fiction gives priority to cultural transmission rather than domination. This new fiction removes the possibility of conflict, struggle and agonism, which were considered important in defining history.