Areni-1 Cave

The territories located between the Great Caucasus range and the Araxes river (here after South Caucasus) are, in a geographical perspective, literally linking two major cultural and natural entities: the Eurasian steppes and the Near East. Not only does the South Caucasus act as a bridge it also has a remarkable diversity of geographic, environmental and climatic conditions. The floral and faunal richness of this area, represented by a significant percentage of endemic species, is a strong argument to consider the Caucasus as one of the four hotspots of biodiversity in Europe and Central Asia. Strong vertical zonation and environmental diversity has promoted cultural regionalism in this area. South Caucasus populations went through considerable socioeconomic evolutions, sometimes provoked by external (i.e. from nearby regions), or locally developed influences. Substantial transformations of lifestyle and subsistence strategies occurred during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic (also called Eneolithic) periods. The Neolithic is characterised by a production system based on agriculture and stock-breeding (with occasional concomitant appearance of sedentarity, ceramics, and new technical systems), whereas the Chalcolithic corresponds to the emergence of extractive metallurgy and a different pattern of land use with the development of short-term settlements [Hamon, 2008: 86-87; Lyonnet et al. 2012: 3; Kushnareva, 1997: 41]. Zooarchaeology, the discipline dedicated to the understanding of relations between human populations and animal world in the past, contribute with quantitative and qualitative data to the socio-economic characterisation of Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures of South Caucasus. This paper aims to review the evidence drawn from earlier studies and current analyses of faunal remains as well as forecasting the zooarchaeological research agenda for the coming years.

In this review, the author will endeavour to combine data from recent and earlier reports. Thirteen assemblages from twelve settlements have been studied before the 1990’s while ten assemblages from seven sites have been studied after 2000. For various reasons, comparing the patterns of animal exploitation from different settlements has always been a challenge for zooarchaeologists [Lawrence, 1973]. This task is even more difficult as the faunal remains have been analysed by different researchers in various periods. Although many efforts have been made in recent decades in order to standardize the way in which zooarchaeologists record and publish their data, (mainly thanks to the work of the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ), this was not the case in earlier times. Early reports of faunal remains analysis from South Caucasus often omitted information concerning archaeological contexts, recovery methods and determination accuracy of the published assemblage. In some cases, the lack of raw data didn't allow the use of statistical methods in order to compare different assemblages. Improvement of zooarchaeological methods in recent decades should also be highlighted. Therefore one could expect later zooarchaeological analyses for the determination of the species or the ageing of remains to be more finely-tuned than the earlier ones. However, it is not possible to rely solely on recent studies as they are few and are mainly concentrated in the Kura and Araxes rivers basins. Neolithic and Chalcolithic faunal remains from West Georgia, for example, are only known from reports published in the late 1970’s. Furthermore, most of the recent studies concern sites which are still under archaeological investigation. Therefore, the results from these studies can only be considered as preliminary. Finally, it has to be stressed that this review is not exhaustive. Some information on faunal remains from further sites are available [Chataigner, 1995: 218, p. 72] but the author, for the purpose of comparing the sites, decided to consider here only reports where raw data (i.e. number of remains or detailed percentages) are published. Remains from Kviriastskali [Varazashvili, 1992: 96-100] and layer I at Aknashen-Khatunarkh [Bălăşescu ... 2010: 34, fig. 9] are not included due to their scarcity. Although their results are not yet available, zooarchaeological investigations are also in progress in several other sites (notably Göytepe, Godedzor and Kültepe I).