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If there are any lingering doubts about the ability of non-humans to cause incalculable suffering by their own capacities, we need look no further than COVID-19, that microscopic, semiliving, spiky [...]

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 [...]

Building on the incipient institutions of the Russian empire, the Soviet Union produced the largest school of classical archaeology beyond the Euro-American academy. This article presents the intellectual history of classical ar- chaeology in one part of this vast Russo-Soviet sphere, the South Caucasus. Although sharing a common historical framework with the discipline as practiced in the West, classical archaeology in the South Caucasus was founded and developed on rather different grounds. This paper probes the beginnings, and subsequent institutionaliza- tion, of antichnaia arkheologiia, or "ancient" archaeology, from the 19th century until the present, providing a re- gional account in the decades before World War II, fol- lowed by a more focused analysis of developments in the Republic of Armenia in the subsequent decades. The purpose of this historical anthropology of the discipline is twofold: to detail the workings of an archaeological tracli- tion in a part of the world that, since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, increasingly has become an area of interest to V~'estern scholars; and to denormalize our own disciplin- aiy culture antI consider what (if any) lessons might be learned from a classical tradition alternative to the one in which Western scholars have been enculturated.* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]