Dr. Ian Lindsay (Purdue University) and collaborators Dr. Alan Greene (Stanford University), Dr. Maureen Marshall (University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign), Dr. Lori Khatchadourian (Cornell University) and Dr. Adam T. Smith (Cornell University), along with collaborators in Armenia, will investigate the relationship between warfare, settlement patterns, and political development in the ancient past. Traditional social science scholarship on pre-modern warfare has typically framed conflict as a rational pursuit of material needs, or as a strategic contest among aspiring elites seeking political advantage in the evolution toward political complexity. However, archaeology is well-positioned to offer a more nuanced perspective of ancient warfare that focuses on the broader fields of social action and historical contexts that shape the motivations, goals, and cultural practices of war. This research will contribute essential time depth to the study of contemporary regional conflicts, their impacts on the politics and identities of social groups, and the ties to place and polity. As persistent ethnic and civil clashes continue to impact contemporary life, understanding the impact of war in the past can help frame the causes and implications of modern conflicts while shaping responses to them. This research will contribute to actionable scholarly efforts to understand the long-term impacts on human political, economic, and settlement practices and subjectivities that emerge within fortified and militarized landscapes.
The ubiquity of stone hillforts in the South Caucasus and the prevalence of metal weapons indicate that violence played an essential role in regional sociopolitical development. Dr. Lindsay and his co-investigators will study the institutional mechanisms through which warfare constituted authority, created and dissolved political association, and shaped a specific form of political economy during the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age periods (ca. 1500-200 BC). The researchers will examine the role of violence and warfare in community formation, social order, and sociopolitical boundaries through a diachronic study of fortified landscapes in the upper Kasakh River valley of northwestern Armenia. In particular, they will address questions regarding how the history of fortress construction and abandonment inform models of political association, what types of violent practices in these areas are evidenced in burial goods and inscribed on human skeletal remains, and how patterns of politics and warfare in the Caucasus correlate with regional environmental shifts and historical change in the neighboring Near East and Eurasian Steppe. The research team will employ a battery of traditional and cutting-edge archaeological approaches to address these issues, including pedestrian and magnetometry survey; the use of drones for aerial photogrammetry of fortresses and associated settlements; test excavation of burials and forts; pollen analysis of a bog core to reconstruct paleoenvironmental contexts; analysis of human remains to study demography, trauma, diet, mobility, and social identity; and portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) and digital radiography on pottery materials to illuminate preliminary patterns of goods circulation. Combined, these techniques will provide the groundwork for a robust evaluation of the long-term engagement of warfare and sociopolitical life in the South Caucasus. In addition, this research will facilitate the training of a new generation of archaeologists in a range of advanced research methods, which will help improve the research infrastructure of scholarship in a region that remains economically disadvantaged.
