Paleoreint, 2002

Current Anthropology, 1980

Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, Suppl.

DOI 10.1179/146195714X13820028180801

1995

Sentient Archaeologies: Global perspectives on places, objects and practice, 2023

It has long been accepted that European Palaeolithic societies of the last interglacial/glacial cycle were likely linked in social networks that connected individuals and groups in information flows to spread risk and provide access to resources and mates. Building on this, Michelle Langley (2013) argued that European Neanderthals inhabited 'social landscapes' of this kind, but Modern Humans imbued their physical environments with symbolic meaning to create 'storied landscapes'. In this paper, we consider these arguments in terms of the archaeological records of three caves we have investigated, all outside Europe: the Niah Cave in Borneo used by anatomically modern humans ('Modern Humans' or simply 'Moderns' in archaeological parlance)since c. 50,000 years ago; the Haua Fteah in Libya used by Moderns from c. 140,000 years ago; and Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan used by Neanderthals until c. 45,000 years ago and then by Moderns. Reviewing the evidence in terms of Langley's principal criteria of landscape marking, personal identities, raw material transport, and norms and customs tied to the landscape, we conclude that the evidence, whilst often ambiguous, serves to widen the debate about Palaeolithic social networks and 'storied landscapes'. At least for the Palaeolithic people using these three caves, there were different ways of being human and different ways of envisaging the landscape beyond that do not map onto the Archaic/Modern dichotomy that is such a cornerstone of evolutionary studies based on the European archaeological record.

Vardzia Conference, Republic of Georgia, 28th May 2017

Four seasons of excavation have recently been completed within the Dariali Gorge in the High Caucasus as part of an international collaboration between Tbilisi State University and Edinburgh and Durham Universities in the UK. This work forms part of the wider European Research Council funded Persia and its Neighbours Project, which aims to investigate the varied responses to territorial control within the frontier regions of Sasanian Empire. Other elements of the project involve fieldwork in northeast Iran, Azerbaijan and Oman. The work in Georgia focuses on the major strategic route through the Caucasus, the Dariali Gorge, which represented both one of the most accessible communication routes through this formidable natural barrier, and at the same time, a weak point in the northern defences of the Late Antique world. For long periods of history – as it is today – control of movement through the gorge was controlled and regulated as a critical security issue and the key component in the apparatus of this operation was Dariali Fort, which sites directly above the modern Georgian/Russian border commanding access through a narrow bottleneck within the precipitous ravine. Recent excavations undertaken within the fort reveal an extended occupation sequence spanning a period from at least the 4th to 14th centuries AD. The intersection of archaeology and history and the perspective afforded by different evidence sources provide a key feature of our multidisciplinary investigation. The textual narrative that is repeated from the 1st century AD to the High Medieval period, is of the high level power-play enacted within the Dariali Gorge with control primarily exercised by sedentary communities with backing from the civilizational centres of the Late Antique world from the south, against the threat of nomadic pastoralists from the north. Yet the fine texture of archaeology is rarely ever so simple. Dariali Fort sits around mid-way along a relatively short, steeply dropping north oriented valley that climbs to a high pass at c.2400m providing access to the south. Subsistence within the valley and the underlying support network on which the garrison of the fort would ultimately have depended, was based on patterns of transhumant farming and seasonal movement up and down the valley with the natural line of communication coming primarily from the north. The detailed investigation of the ceramic sequence from Dariali Fort allows us to examine the material manifestation of the supply and circulation of mundane aspects of the primary subsistence base, which confirms the importance of provisioning coming from the north. Once again the material evidence forces us examine the simple linearity presented to us in the surviving fragments of politicised narrative passed down from ancient times. Even within one of the most clearly marked and fiercely contested frontier regions in the ancient world, what we appear to be looking at is a line of control rather than one of binary division.