Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Beyond States & Dynasties: Toward an archaeology of practice on the Armenian highland, 600-200 BC

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Under the supervision of Dr. Norman Yoffee, Lori Khatchadourian will conduct excavations at three sites on the Tsaghkahovit plain of central Armenia, and analyze the ceramic artifacts discovered in the course of these excavations. The three sites"Tsaghkahovit, Tsilkar, and Hnaberd" were occupied in the mid-first millennium BC, when the Armenian highland was governed by a local dynasty. This dynasty was itself a part of the larger Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, a vast polity ruling much of southwest Asia in the two centuries before the conquests of Alexander the Great. Khatchadourian is investigating the organization of political and social life in one community within these larger entities. This will be accomplished through two forms of analysis, one spatial and one material. Spatial analysis will entail examining the arrangement of the built environment, and the ways in which architecture creates and restricts access, joins and segregates households and neighborhoods, and reaffirms or transcends social differences. Material analysis consists of the scientific study of ceramic production processes, from the sourcing of the raw clay from which ceramics are made to the strategies in the forming of vessels, as well as patterns in their exchange, use, and deposition. Such analyses promise to reveal the daily routines and choices of individual actors and groups on the Tsaghkahovit plain, and to inform how such routines can both demarcate social boundaries within a community and constitute shared practices that maintain the integrity of that community. The importance of Khatchadourian's research lies in its focus on the micro-scale interactions that ultimately sustain complex societies. Traditional approaches to social life and politics in ancient southwest Asia have tended to focus on macroscopic entities such as the state or the dynasty. This has resulted in top-down explanations for the evolution of civilization and grand historical accounts of ruling elites and the remarkable events they orchestrated. Polities are ultimately made up, however, of a multiplicity of social orientations and collectivities at the local levels of society, which successful governments manage through an institutional apparatus that orders conflict and binds communities. These local-level interactions are, in aggregate, the constituting forces for stability and change. This research project focuses precisely on such local-level interactions to better understand how communities reproduce themselves within larger political entities. The broader impact of this project emanates from its commitment to post-Soviet institution-building, local development, and responsible scientific discourse on a period of the past that is of contemporary relevance in the south Caucasus. Partnerships forged during the course of this research with senior scholars and students in Armenia will result in co-published papers that promise to enhance knowledge in the West of a region long closed off by the Iron Curtain. No less important is the developmental impact of the project on the communities inhabiting the Tsaghkahovit plain today, who will participate in archaeology's dialogue with the past. Encouraging local communities to engage with the past is of vital importance in the Caucasus, where ethnic conflicts have recuperated archaeological pasts to justify territorial claims. Results will be disseminated principally within scholarly circles in both Armenia and the United States, and also within community groups in both countries who feel invested in the cultural heritage of the south Caucasus. Khatchadourian's research takes place under the auspices of a collaborative research project between the University of Chicago and Armenia's Institute for Archaeology and Ethnography.