Lecture by Dr. Emily Hammer

The Graduate Students of Anthropology Association Presents a lecture by Dr. Emily Hammer on Highland Fortress-polities and their Settlement Systems in the South Caucasus. Dr. Hammer is Director of CAMEL (Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes) Lab-Oriental Institute at The University of Chicago. The lecture is from 10:30 to 11:30 AM and will be followed by a reception.

 

In the Late Bronze Age (1500-1150 BC) and Iron Age (1150 BC-300 AD), fortresses dotted hilltops in eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and the South Caucasus. Fortresses are frequently the most highly visible ruins of any ancient period in this region and are indicative of the first emergence of territorial polities. After a long period of mobility and pastoral economy that left few archaeologically-visible settlements during the preceding Middle Bronze Age, Late Bronze and Iron Age fortresses have been interpreted as marking the reappearance of a more settled mode of life and the transition to an agricultural economy. Certain fortresses have been connected with the area's first historically attested polity and earliest known empire, the kingdom of Urartu. Large populations living in the agricultural plains below fortresses would have been needed to provide the labor necessary to construct and maintain them. However, little is known about the location, size, and character of the domestic settlements that must have been associated with these fortresses or the identity and subsistence strategies of their inhabitants. Recent archaeological and geophysical survey in the Şərur Plain of Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan, has revealed a multiple fortress-settlement complex that offers the opportunity to examine the ancient populations living in the shadows of fortresses. The dominant fortress on the plain, Oğlanqala, was part of a settlement complex consisting of two fortresses and a domestic settlement, all of which may have been surrounded by a wall enclosing at least 490ha. The position of the complex at the entrance to a river pass may have facilitated control of highland pastoral and lowland agricultural resources. These survey findings increase our understanding of societies at the fringes of the Iron Age Kingdom of Urartu and raise several questions for future investigation about the nature of early urbanism in South Caucasia during the Middle/Late Bronze and Iron Ages.