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At least since the nineteenth century, preservation has provided the primary justification for educating the public about archaeology and heritage, an outgrowth of liberalism's concern to cultivate good citizens (Bennett 1995 ; Smith 2006). In the United States, the turn to education as an indirect strategy of site preservation began in earnest in the 1970s, as expanding postwar development and the growth of the antiquities market threatened heritage resources (Wylie 2005 : 50). The 1988 amendment to the US Archaeological Resource Protection Act mandated that federal agencies establish public education programs for the express purpose of protecting heritage resources (Franklin and Moe 2012 : 572; Little 2012 : 400). Still today, preservation prevails as the dominant rationale for archaeological education, as enshrined in Principle 4 of the Society for American Archaeology's Principles of Archaeological Ethics. Nick Merriman (2004 : 5) calls this the "deficit model" of archaeological education. The premise is that the public lacks the knowledge necessary to safeguard heritage assets, and that the greater their "archaeological literacy" the better stewards they will be of collective heritage resources (Franklin and Moe 2012). The "deficit model" of archaeological education serves to benefit the archaeological profession and wider heritage apparatus, forging a public that shares practitioners' values and that will be compliant with cultural resource regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances an interpretive pottery typology for the northern Near Eastern highlands during early historical periods, or the mid-7th to late 4th centuries B.C. The study represents an effort to integrate intuitive approaches to pottery classification that use vessel form and surface appearance as discriminant criteria with a consideration of craft technology as meaningful social practice. The central Armenian settlement of Tsaghkahovit provides the vantage for these investigations. Nine seasons of excavations at the site yielded a ceramic assemblage that bears upon three phases in the archaeology of the Iron Age: the enigmatic mid-7th to mid-6th century, the early Achaemenid period (ca. 550-430 B.C.) and the last Achaemenid century (ca. 430-330 B.C.). The paper offers an appraisal of pottery typology in each of these phases and examines stylistic shifts through the lens of craft learning. The primary concern is to discern those forces residing within the domain of pottery production that drove perceived typological changes in the mountainous region encompassing what is today northern Iran, eastern Turkey, and the South Caucasus. A catalogue of the Tsaghkahovit pottery corpus is included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

During four field seasons spanning 2014 through 2017, Project ArAGATS (Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies) expanded our long-term research on the origins and development of complex political systems in the South Caucasus with a comprehensive study of the upper Kasakh River valley in north-central Armenia. The Kasakh Valley Archaeological Survey employed both systematic transect survey of 43 km2 and extensive satellite- and drone-based reconnaissance to accommodate the complex topography of the Lesser Caucasus and the impacts of Soviet-era land amelioration. Though our survey was animated by questions related to the chronology and distribution of Bronze and Iron Age fortifications and cemeteries, we also recorded Paleolithic sites stretching back to the earliest human settlement of the Caucasus, Early Bronze Age surface finds, and historic landscape modifications. Concurrent to the survey, members of the ArAGATS team carried out test excavations at select settlement sites and associated burials, and a series of wetland core extractions, with the goals of affirming site occupation sequences and setting them within their environmental context. This report provides an overview of the results of these multidisciplinary activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steppe and grassland ecosystems constitute important biomes that are influenced by multiple factors such as climate, human activity, and fire. Yet how these factors have influenced the plant composition of these biomes through time continues to be understudied. This paper investigates how these mechanisms have transformed the steppe landscape recorded at the mire site of Shenkani, Armenia. This highland site, located in the South Caucasus, has a long human history of permanent settlements near the core site starting at 5500 cal. BP. A variety of biological and geochemical proxies, including pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs, macro-charcoal, 14C age model, X-ray fluorescence, loss-of-ignition, magnetic susceptibility, and a quantitative climate reconstruction inferred from pollen, are utilized in this paper. We find that this area has remained a steppe with small stands of trees throughout the duration of the Holocene. Changes in steppe plant composition primarily occur between semi-desert steppes (Chenopodiaceae), grassland steppes (or Poaceae dominated meadow-steppes), and mixed steppes with forest patches. In this record, two phases of local grassland expansion occurred between 9500 and 7000 cal. BP and 2500–1000 cal. BP, which covaried with local fire events. These grassland steppes were sustained until tree encroachment led to a more mixed steppe landscape around 7000 cal. BP and again at 1000 cal. BP. Climate, primarily precipitation, is the main driver of this persistent steppe landscape and the plant compositional shifts within it. However, fire and human activities contributed to steppe maintenance. • A 10,240 year-old sequence from Shenkani, Armenia documents a persistent Holocene steppe. • Changes in steppe plant composition occur between semi-desert, grassland, and mixed steppes with forest patches. • Poaceae dominated grasslands covary with fires that limit tree and shrub encroachment. • The mid- to late Holocene transition is characterized by drops in Betula and declines in distant arboreal pollen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]