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Between 2008 and 2011, the joint American-Armenian project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS) conducted archaeological excavations at the Iron Age settlement of Tsaghkahovit in central-western Armenia. This work built on research begun in 2005 to closely examine the materiality of social and political life in a rural settlement of the Achaemenid Persian empire (ca. 550-330 B.C.E.). Intensive investigations at Tsaghkahovit have revealed the remains of a community clearly enmeshed in select sociopolitical institutions of the empire yet one also committed to reproducing and revising the contours of everyday life on the Armenian highlands on its own terms. The site thus invites consideration of the quotidian material and spatial practices of imperial subjects who both sustained and attenuated the viability of Achaemenid sovereignty in the Armenian satrapy. This article reports on recent excavations and offers preliminary interpretations of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]