Areni-1 Cave

Situated within a natural cul-de-sac between the Black and Caspian Seas and the Greater Caucasus, the southern Caucasus, a term that commonly refers to the modern republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, lies at the meeting point of Africa, Europe, and Asia. The region’s favorable climate and rich natural resources have attracted human populations throughout Paleolithic times, which is borne out by an extremely prolifi c record of Paleolithic occupation (Lyubin 1984; 1989; 1998). It is also thought that the southern Caucasus was an important refuge for humans during Pleistocene glacial periods and, thus, served as a core from which recolonizations of Eurasia occurred (Bar-Yosef 1994; Finlayson 2004; Dennell et al. 2011; Dalén et al. 2012 ).
The modern Republic of Armenia is located at the heart of this corridor and will therefore play a pivotal role in our understanding of the Paleolithic settlement of the southern Caucasus and, indeed, beyond. Until recently, the Lower Paleolithic record of Armenia was based exclusively on open-air artifact scatters situated directly on, or in close proximity to, obsidian outcrops that lacked any stratigraphic context. These sites were nonetheless widely considered from the late 1940s and early 1950s through the early 1980s as the oldest evidence of human occupation within the borders of the Soviet Union (Panichkina 1950b, pp. 22, 68, 99; Zamyatnin 1950, p. 128; Sardaryan 1954, pp. 72, 170; Okladnikov 1956, pp. 26-29; Yefi menko et al. 1956, pp. 18-19; Pershits et al. 1982, p. 83; Praslov 1984, p. 42). While the importance of stratifi ed Lower Paleolithic sites was certainly recognized, all attempts by Soviet scholars (S. Sardaryan, M. Panichkina, V. Lyubin, H. Ghazaryan) to discover such evidence proved unsuccessful (Panichkina 1950, pp. 24-25; Klein 1966, pp. 4-5;
Ghazaryan 1986).
The spectacular record from Dmanisi in late 1980s (Georgian Republic), dated to between 1.85 and 1.78 million years ago, demonstrates that the southern Caucasus was home to Paleolithic peoples by at least the Early Pleistocene (Lordkipanidze 1998; Gabunia et al. 2000; de Lumley et al. 2002; Tappen et al. 2007; Ferring et al. 2011). Given the proximity of Dmanisi to Armenia, there is every reason to assume that archaeological sites of similar age would be discovered in Armenia, and this assumption has spurred new archaeological surveys throughout the country (Gasparian 2010).
This article is a preliminary attempt to summarize Lower Paleolithic data from the Soviet period and provide a brief description of the recently implemented surveys and test excavations which reveal that several sites have great potential to preserve in situ occupations. Future work will target these areas for systematic excavation.