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Document Details : Title: Unravelling the Kura-Araxes Cultural Tradition across Space and Time Author(s): BATIUK, Stephen , ROTHMAN, Mitchell , SAMEI, Siavash , HOVSEPYAN, Roman Journal: Ancient Near Eastern Studies Volume: 59 Date: 2022 Pages: 239-329 DOI: 10.2143/ANES.59.0.3291195 Abstract : The Kura-Araxes is one of the cultural traditions that along with those of its neighbours in Mesopotamia, Iran, Eurasia, Anatolia and the Levant tells the story of the greater Near Eastern region in late prehistory. All cultural traditions of the Near East and the societies they spawned have distinctive cultural packages and economic, political and social organisation and practices. At the same time, each region was in some ways interrelated with the others. In this regard, the Kura-Araxes represents a particular pattern. The Kura-Araxes first appeared in the mid-fourth millennium BC in the South Caucasus (modern Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, eastern Turkey and parts of northwestern Iran). By 2850 BC its core package of cultural traits had spread across the Zagros Mountains to its south, north across the Greater Caucasus Mountains and west along the Taurus Mountains down into the southern Levant. Evidence indicates that the tradition spread through population migration and cross-cultural interactions. It created a different yet interrelated narrative in each area of the so-called homeland zone and in its diaspora. Batiuk and Rothman organised a six-day workshop in Toronto in 2017 to bring together 11 scholars from different parts of the world and from different intellectual traditions to discuss issues related to solving the complex puzzle that is the Kura-Araxes. This paper is a summary of that workshop’s discussion and, where possible, conclusions relating to why the Kura-Araxes cultural tradition originated, what its essential nature was, why it expanded, and what the interaction of bearers of this cultural tradition with other traditions says about processes of cross-cultural contact and change in the past. |
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