Public Lecture: Ancient and Modern Identity and Adaptation: The Case of the Kura Araxes Cultural Tradition by Dr. Mitchell S. Rothman

Kura Araxes Cultures of the Early Bronze Age.  The 4^th into the 3^rd millennium BC in the Middle East and Eurasia was one of the most dynamic in world history.  In southern Mesopotamia the foundations of the modern world were laid: life in cities, rule through authority and by bureaucrats, social differentiation, mass production, and “international”  trade to bring raw materials and goods lacking in the south for production and for signifying the new statuses of a state society.  In the highland zones where these raw materials and technologies were coming from change was also occurring.  However, it was change of a different kind.  The emergence of the Kura Araxes saw the development of new local adaptations and a distinct cultural tradition marked by a type of burnished, handmade pottery and a ritual of the hearth.  This tradition, dominant in the south Caucasus, spread southwest across the Taurus Mountains and south into the South Levant, southeast into the Zagros Mountains, and north across the Caucasus.  As Adam Smith, wrote in 2005, we have little idea of what the Kura Araxes really is and little sense of what Kura Araxes Communities were like.  This lecture discusses these questions from an anthropological archaeologist’s point of view.

Dr. Mitchell S Rothman is a professor and chair of the Anthropology Department at Widener University near Philadelphia, USA, and a Contributing Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Michigan, his Masters at Hunter College City University of New York, and his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988.  He has been pursuing questions about the nature of the dynamic 4^thand early 3rd millennium BC, the evolution of ancient societies, and the effects of cross-cultural contact for many years.  His dissertation was on a site in northeastern Iraq, Tepe Gawra, and he first did research in Iran in the 1970’s.  After the revolution, he worked on projects over 16 years in Turkey, including excavation of a mound near the Syrian border on the Euphrates, Tilbes Hoyuk, and a survey in the Mus(h) Province west of Lake Van, a former center of modern Armenian culture.  It was there that he became fascinated by the Kura Araxes, and decided 8 years ago to pursue its study in the homeland of the cultural tradition, in Armenia.  He has been working with Dr. Hakob Simonyan of the Culture Ministry for the past 7 years on the site of Shengavit in the city of Yerevan.  They completed excavations in 2012. Currently they are working on a web archive, and book about the site and it cultural tradition.