The View from the North
Abstract. During the Neolithic (ca. 6200-5000 BCE), South Caucasian economies basically developed within a fairly secluded environment that afforded only limited relationships with Syrian or Mesopotamian communities. However, a change in interregional dynamics occurred in the course of the 5th mille...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/paleorient, |
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| Auteur principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Anglais |
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Paléorient
2022
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | Abstract. During the Neolithic (ca. 6200-5000 BCE), South Caucasian economies basically developed within a fairly secluded environment that afforded only limited relationships with Syrian or Mesopotamian communities. However, a change in interregional dynamics occurred in the course of the 5th millennium, which led to the progressive integration of the South Caucasus into a wider region that included western Iran, eastern Anatolia, the northern Levant, northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia. This shift resulted in the development of a new interaction sphere that I have called the “Chaff-Faced Ware oikumenè”. As indicated by its name, these interactions are perceptible through the development of similar crafting practices in ceramic production, but common trends in house building and funerary traditions are also noteworthy. Alongside these common trends, it is interesting to note that South Caucasian obsidian starts to be found on a few Mesopotamian sites, sometimes as far as the Persian Gulf. In the South Caucasus as in Upper Mesopotamia, the systematic use of chaff, and the resulting chaff-faced effect, appear in the first half of the 5th millennium BCE. However, while the development of Chaff-Faced Ware in Mesopotamia marks a clear concept change in ceramic crafting between the Ubaid and the post-Ubaid periods, the evidence from the South Caucasus is more ambiguous: the ceramic assemblages known from the Caucasian Early Chalcolithic are technologically diverse; moreover, unlike the pottery from the Ubaid world, they do not form a regionally coherent stylistic repertoire. In any case, the emergence of Chaff-Faced Ware in the Caucasus does not mark a sharp conceptual break with previous ceramic crafting practices, as it does in the Ubaid world. Hence, the increasing commonalities in ceramic productions that develop between the middle of the 5th and the mid-4th millennium BCE in the Caucasus and Syro-Mesopotamia alike give rise to a number of intriguing questions, all the more so as several “diagnostic” ceramic types used in Near-Eastern archaeology to identify “Post-Ubaid” or “Early Uruk” assemblages have been found in a gold or silver version in the Majkop kurgans of northern Caucasia. Following the reflections I first published in 2010 and 2012, this paper reviews the archaeological data recently collected in the Caucasus so as to give a better insight into the significance of the Chaff-Faced Ware oikumenè in an era marked by major transformations. |
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