VRS Spotlight: Alan Greene

After a busy field season I am delighted to have joined ISAW this fall as a Visiting Research Scholar in the archaeology of the ancient South Caucasus. My training is in anthropological archaeology, meaning that I focus on the social and cultural dimensions of life in the ancient world. My particular interests lie in the initial governments and inequalities developed by local peoples in the mid second millennium BC. It is at this time that nomadic pastoralist inhabitants began building numerous hilltop fortresses across the rocky crags and outcrops of the Lesser Caucasus, complexes that featured religious shrines, divinatory equipment, and storage rooms often situated adjacent to massive necropolises of burial tumuli. My doctoral research focused on an analysis of the flows of goods and ceramic containers between such fortresses in what is now Armenia, as part of a study of the shifts in production, distribution, and consumption that accompanied this move toward settled life and more hierarchical social forms. One of my foci at ISAW this year is the conversion of this research into a monograph that compares the economic life visible among these earliest polities in the South Caucasus with other early political economies in the ancient world.

Fortress building makes rather overt connections to conflict and warfare, but there has been scant archaeological evidence, in terms of weapons, iconography, or skeletal trauma, to suggest a scale of conflict commensurate with the massive building program undertaken in the 14th and 13th centuries BC. This problem, and its links to our understanding of late second millennium sociopolitics in general, frames my current fieldwork project, an archaeological survey of Armenia’s upper Kasakh River valley. Archaeological survey, the process of searching for, identifying, and recording “unknown” archaeological sites, can be accomplished in a variety of ways, from interviewing local residents, to looking out the window of a moving jeep, to on-the-ground checking for sites not visible from well trod routes and satellite images. My team and I are relying on systematic pedestrian survey, in which researchers space themselves a specific distance apart and walk in straight lines, called “transects,” across the landscape between set points, trekking through the grassy valley bottoms and the steep, rocky foothills. Our project uses tablet computers, linked via mobile 

data connections to our online geodatabase, to record site architecture and artifact scatters. We are also performing aerial survey through the use of a quadcopter drone, which flies its own, automated transects and allows us to construct 3D models of the valley segments that we explore and the archaeological sites that we record.

The outer wall of a fortress recorded by KVAS during the 2016 field season. This massive site featured no surface materials—not uncommon in the Lesser Caucasus—and its dating will therefore wait until test excavations can be performed. 

In concert with our survey fieldwork, we are excavating burial clusters at the site of Aparani Berd, near the center of the upper valley, to investigate bodily indications of warfare on the physical remains of ancient residents. Together, these investigations are pushing forward the first systematic, regional study of fortified landscapes in the ancient South Caucasus and exposing patterns of settlement and traces of conflict at the dawn of this region’s earliest governments and social inequalities.