SOUTHERN CAUCASUS ON THE BRINK OF METAL AGE

Abstract

The offered work attempts to identify the time and form of the Southern Caucasus’ transition to the Metal Age. To substantiate our views concerning this matter, we foreshadowed our assumptions by a brief excursus of our views of the forerunning processes and evolution of scientific views of the epochal periodization of Southern Caucasus’s traditions. The basic archeological site for fulfillment of the key task of this work is settlement Alkhantepe. Materials obtained in the course of examination of the site - still the only Caucasus’s settlement that provided nearly a full complex of ancient metallurgic production, as well as the use of separate findings from other sites - allowed identifying and to a possible degree substantiating the time and forms of the Southern Caucasus’ transition to the Metal Age. Alkhantepe is one of the architectural sites of the Leilatepe tradition. It is located on the Mugan plain in the southeast of the Azerbaijan Republic, 4 kilometers north of village Uchtepe of the Jalilabad region, at absolute height of 41 kilometers: coordinates: N 39 ° 21' 607"; E 048 °27 ' 720". The site is located at a practically smooth, horizontal portion of a steppe. It has no ground topographical signs. Its area is equivalent to approximately 4 hectares. Natural-climatic conditions of the Mugan plain, in the period of existence of settlement Alkhantepe, have been identified on the basis of analysis of palynological spore-pollen spectrum obtained from the settlement’s section. These climatic conditions are more humid compared to present-day ones. There is traced natural dehydration of the climate. There have been identified two periods of agriculture prevalence. This is a single-layer settlement. Maximal thickness of its cultural sediments reached to 3 meters. The sediments consisted of seven construction horizons, which at separate portions broke up into smaller horizons. In its turn, the whole cultural layer breaks up into two sets of sediments, between which the territory above was subjected to tectonic shifts. Here, there have been discovered the remains of dugouts and semi-dugouts, round and rectangular semi-dugouts, rectangular dugouts with brick walls and simple ground walls, as well as ground brick and wattle and daub constructions. There have been cleared the remains of various home hearths and production furnaces, including furnaces relating to metallurgy and metalworking. Noteworthy is that remains of 13 graves have been found during the examination of Alkhantepe. The age of those buried ranges from infants to adults. The burial (funeral) rites are also different. Ceramic vessels were most often used for the burial of infants. A collection of a large number of pottery, bone, stone and metal works was discovered at Alkhantepe. The pottery consists of specimens having a great variety of forms and sizes, different technological and functional designations. Many of them were formed using a rotating device. The discovery of metallic goods as well as metallic slag (the metallurgic production’s waste), production furnaces and metalworking implements demonstrates that the Leilatepe tradition’s carriers acquired all metallurgy and metalworking habits. The analyses of metals and the waste of metallurgic production and metalworking obtained from Leilatepe tradition sites, including Alkhantepe, have revealed their copper-based rather substantial natural and artificial additives that, as a matter of fact, signifies that some of these discoveries are bronze ones. In other words, the tradition’s carriers also acquired bronze production habits so they can no way be referred even to the Upper Eneolithic/Halcolithic. The carriers of this tradition had already stepped to the Bronze Age. First local Caucasian metallurgy followed the appearance of the Leilatepe tradition’s carriers on the Caucasus. It was not established on the basis of or in entrails of the Caucasian Neolithic, i.e. Southern Caucasian traditions dating back to the Neolithic-Eneolithic but was brought to the region by migrants carriers of the Uruk tradition. Leilatepe tradition’s carriers made their first step in the Caucasus in the Metal Age, immediately in the Bronze Age.