Paleobotanical Analysis

Paleobotanical analyses on Project ArAGATS are currently being utilized in order to identify the primary cultivars in evidence from each era of past occupation under study and develop a model of the history of regional land cover and land use. Initial investigations of paleobotanical remains suggest an enduring focus upon barley cultivation with wheat less well-represented in available macrobotanical remains. In future seasons, we plan to correlate the paleobotanical findings from our excavations with paleoenvironmental data from bog cores below the northeast slope of Mt. Aragats. Results are also currently pending for pollen analysis of washes from ceramics recovered from the Late Bronze Age shrine at Gegharot. Project ArAGATS’s macrobotanical studies are conducted by Roman Hovsepyan (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Yerevan).