The Earliest Farmers of the Caucasus: A View from Masis Blur
First lecture in Archaeology of Armenia: Early Settlements, Dragon Stones, and Gods of Urartu
Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky, Postdoctoral Scholar, CIoA, UCLA
Alan Farahani, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UNLV
September 16, 2020
This talk is a summary of research conducted at the archaeological site of Masis Blur, an early farming community located in the Ararat plain of Armenia and occupied continuously for nearly a millennium from ca. 6200 cal. BC - 5200 cal. BC. While much is known about how communities in west Asia adopted a farming way of life, much less is known about the Caucasus. The Masis Blur Archaeological Project explores the rhythms of everyday life at the Neolithic village in this understudied region using high resolution techniques to recover, record, and analyse the material remains of day-to-day activities. The talk highlights recent fieldwork and preliminary results from Masis Blur with specific focus on enhanced photographic techniques (photogrammetry), archaeological plant remains , animal husbandry, obsidian procurement, and a few key discoveries such as calcified basket remains, evidence of thatched roofs, and pigment processing workshops which, to date, are singular for the region.