Tag Archives: Late Bronze Age

Gegharot Shrines, in the News

The Late Bronze Age shrines at Gegharot discussed in the recent American Journal of Archaeology article by Adam T Smith and Jeffrey Leon have made it into the mainstream scientific (and not so scientific) news.

West Terrace Shrine at Gegharot

LiveScience originated the article–thanks to Owen Jarus for a thoughtful, accessible piece.

The article was picked up by YahooNews, DiscoveryNews, Fox News, NBC News,  and the DailyMail.  The latter news outlet gave the shrines its own unique spin, proving that even the Bronze Age can be sensationalized!

UPDATE: Sensationalized headlines from the Late Bronze Age:

DailyMail: “How Bronze Age rulers got HIGH to predict the future: Armenian shrines reveal bizarre practices of fortune tellers 3,300 years ago”

Ancient Origins: “Despite possible efforts to alter the future, a greedy ancient polity went down in flames”

UPDATE 2: An additional story ran in the Cornell Chronicle

Project ArAGATS in the AJA

Congratulations to Adam Smith and Jeff Leon, whose article “Divination and Sovereignty: The Late Bronze Age Shrines at Gegharot, Armenia” appears in the current issue (and on the cover!) of the American Journal of Archaeology.  

AJA cover

New Views on Gegharot’s East Citadel

T34 Floor

Project Architect Lilit Ter-Minasyan and an assistant from the village of Gegharot map the features uncovered in Gegharot’s Operation T34

An unfinished operation on Gegharot’s East Citadel has already yielded interesting results.  In an area not far from the East Citadel shrine that we documented in 2011 we have opened a paved stone floor dating to the Late Bronze Age.  Adjacent to the floor were three surviving (and possibly two other unpreserved) curvilinear stone-lined features.   The floor and features were later covered during the site’s first destruction episode.  A new wall was then subsequently built atop the destruction debris.

Ethnographic analogies traditionally hold that narrow paved galleries such as the one we’ve uncovered served as pens for young animals.  The small adjacent basins would then make sense as feeding troughs.  What is perhaps most interesting about such a reconstruction is the room’s proximity to the shrine.  Did young animals figure prominently in the ritual practices of the shrine?  We are hoping that expanded excavations and faunal analysis might shed some light on the question.

 

New Publication Alert

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Now in press at the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology:
Lindsay, I. and A. Greene
2013  Sovereignty, mobility, and political cartographies in Late Bronze Age southern Caucasia. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.