From Kura-Araxes to Early Kurgans. Tracing 3rd millennium social and cultural changes in the Kura river valley (Georgia and Azerbaijan). Environment, food, chronology.

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The KUR(A)GAN project aims at investigating the radical changes in social orders, economy, cultural values and lifestyles during the third millennium BCE in South Caucasus. Over a short period of time, the stability of a non-hierarchal societal model was shuttered and replaced by a completely different type of society (so-called Early Kurgan) featuring sharp vertical social differences, organised along high-ranking chiefs and founded on display and accumulation of metals. The so-called "Kura Araxes Culture", which developed systematically in South Caucasus as early as 3400 BCE, centered on the household and horizontal kinship relations and featuring an egalitarian social ideology represented for almost one millennium the socio-cultural expression of small-scale sedentary societies of the Caucasian highlands. Why did the Kura Araxes communities and socio-cultural system disappeared around 2600 BCE and were replaced by hierarchized communities featuring a mobile lifestyle and different cultural traditions, among which the new burial custom of the funerary tumuli (Kurgans)? To answer this question and account for an all-encompassing "systemic" change that disrupted the South Caucasian social trajectories, we propose an interdisciplinary project based on a multiscalar approach combing field (settlements and kurgans excavations) and laboratory activities (archaeozoology, archaeobotany, pollen, isotopic analyses). This data aim at characterising and comparing Kura-Araxes and Early Kurgan societies in terms of subsistence strategies, diets, economy ,cultural practices and lifestyles and at producing new palaeonevironmental and palaeoclimatic data to investigate the role of environmental and climatic evolutions in these radical transformations. One of the key and innovative issues of our research is the establishment, for the first time in South Caucasus, of an independent climate curve for the 3rd millennium BCE thanks to the perfect wood conservation of numerous Kurgans that will be the object of specific dendroclimatological research. A large series of AMS-14C analyses from old and new excavations, coupled with dendrochronological dates, will construct a new robust and refined third-millennium chronology. The geographical focus of this research lies in Georgia and Azerbaijan where the German-French research group will collaborate with local colleagues. The Kura River Valley bridging these two countries, serves as the backbone connecting ecologically diverse areas in which the sites of interest are located. Starting from the lowland sites of Tsikhia Gora and Doghlauri, Hasansu and Uzun Rama, the project will unfold along the Alazani and the Qaraçay rivers where kurgans and the site of Qaraçinar will be investigated. Finally, research in the Tsalka plateau in Georgia, where both excavations of kurgans and environmental investigations will be carried out, will complement information from the highland regions.