The Early Bronze Age of the Southern Caucasus

The aim of this article is to highlight the social and cultural developments that took place in the Southern Caucasus during the Early Bronze Age. Between 3500 and 2500 BC ca., new pottery, architectural and metallurgical traditions, known collectively as Kura-Araxes, new settlement forms in the mountain regions and new funerary customs emerged.

Examining these changes, the article draws a picture of the organization of the Early Bronze Age communities in the Southern Caucasus societies centering primarily on the household and horizontal kinship relationships.

We argue that this model was radically different from those of the vertically organized societies of Southern Mesopotamia and Northern Caucasus. Finally, the paper focuses on the changing role of metals towards the mid-third millennium BC and that, by causing radical social transformations, also brought to an end the Kura-Araxes traditions.

The Early Bronze Age of the Southern Caucasus

The funerary practices of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic populations of the Southern Caucasus are poorlyknown. However, in the last few years, research in funerary archaeology intensified in the region, usingrecently developed approaches such as archaeothanatology.

Thanks to the excavation of burials ac-cording to this method as well as to the reassessment of the published data, it is possible to achieve astate of knowledge on funerary behavior of these populations. Across the whole region, 23 sites withburials have been recorded: Neolithic (2), Chalcolithic (15), Neolithic and Chalcolithic (2) and uncertainchronological attribution (Neolithic and/or Chalcolithic) (4).

All data collected revealed a diversificationof the practices from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic. Neolithic funerary practices are less homogeneousthan previously thought and burial sites appear to have been closely related to living places.

During the Chalcolithic, a diversification of the ways of burying the dead occurs with the appearance of new types oftombs (burials in ceramic vessels and kurgans) and an evolution of the relations between the place of lifeand the place of the dead can be seen.

Diversification of the funerary practices in the Southern Caucasusfrom the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic