Neolithization processes in the Middle Kura basin

Abstract

Research into the Neolithization of the Southern Caucasus has entered a new stage in the 2000s, with a remarkable increase in international archaeological investigations employing cutting-edge feld techniques and related laboratory studies. Current research indicates that full-fledged Neolithic societies emerged in the Southern Caucasus in the early sixth millennium BC, most likely through interaction with Neolithic societies of Southwest Asia. Neolithization took place in the southern Caucasus at the beginning of the sixth millennium BC, most likely as part of the expansion of the Neolithic socioeconomy from the Middle East, where the food production economy had been established at least a few thousand years earlier. However, local adaptation and indigenous cultural development are also likely to have played important roles in this process, by which distinct Neolithic ways of life emerged in the southern Caucasus. Tis article reports on 46 radiocarbon dates obtained from the two recently excavated Early Pot-tery Neolithic sites of Göytepe and Hacı Elamxanlı Tepe, the oldest farming villages known to date in West Azerbaijan. Comparing the dates from other related sites demonstrates that several settlements representing the earliest Pottery Neolithic emerged almost simultaneously at the beginning of the sixth millennium B.C.E. in the northern and southern foothills of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains.