Regarding Ritual Behaviour at Shengavit, Armenia

doi: 10.2143/ANES.52.0.3082864 ANES 52 (2015) 1-46 Regarding Ritual Behaviour at Shengavit, Armenia Hakob SIMONYAN and Mitchell S ROTHMAN Abstract The Kura-Araxes cultural tradition is reflected in the mountains north, east and west of Mesopotamia from the mid-fourth to mid-third millennia BC. Originating in the Armenian Highlands and its sub- set the South Caucasus, it developed over that period, and also spread across a wide area of the Taurus and Zagros mountains, down into the Southern Levant, and north beyond the Caucasus Mountains. Despite many decades of excavation of sites relating to this cultural tradition, we know surprisingly little about the societies of the homelands and their relationship to their migrant diaspora. This paper looks at one aspect of those cultures, ritual practice and ideology, to see if it is possible better to define the nature of and changes in Kura-Araxes societies within the homelands, and their possible relationship to migrant communities. The focus of the inquiry is the site of Shengavit in the foothills above the Ararat Plain in Armenia. Introduction Archaeology as a field has been in a state of flux regarding theoretical approaches to analysing archaeological remains. This is especially so among different national schools, many of which have been intellectual islands with little interaction and discussion among them of the theoretical approaches they find most appropriate. Of the two authors here Simonyan belongs to a cultural historical school and Rothman to a neo-evolutionary school influenced by new post-processual insights. However, whether one subscribes to new theoretical constructs of culture and culture change represented by historical or structuralist post-processualists,1 or more traditional definitions typical of the neo-evolutionary school, or culture historians,2 represented in the West by Childe,3 the Kura-Araxes cultural tradition provides a rich source of research and theory. The problem is to find common ground. For our purposes here, there is common ground that can inform the study of ritual at Shengavit and in general. Every school believes that ideology, whether secular, sacred, or both at the same time, reflects the economic, political, and social organisation and dynamics of groups of people who share a common symbolic vocabulary that encodes ideology. All believe that the artefactual remains of ideology are its symbolic representa- tions (see below). Behind these are real individuals and groups of people who use the symbols for 1 Rothman n.d.; Pauketat 2001. 2 Rothman 2004. 3 Childe 1929. 97958.indb 1 19/06/15 09:32 2 H. SIMONYAN – M.S. ROTHMAN a socially complex variety of purposes.4 In practice, individuals create these artefactual symbols, and their meanings are negotiated and determined by their users. Where this common understanding becomes contentious is in part in defining terms. The culture historical school defines a ‘culture’ or ‘people’ — they are essentially the same — as a common set of artefactual attributes. To Simonyan this means an objective reality of a coherent group of people living in the same place and time. It is the sum of similarity in artefacts by type, manufacture and style, as well as commonalities of organisation and ideology. The greatest problem is defining what traits constitute a particular culture. Neo-evolutionists in their most recent iterations see culture as elements of the shared, learned behaviours (practices) in which identity, organisation, social behaviour (rules and norms), and secular and sacred ideologies are defined.5 In the latter school different societies, mostly economic and political units, can share cultural elements — they are not so tightly bounded — and certainly different ethnic groups derived from the same cultural source can be members of different societies and yet share cultural attributes with their homelands. Because culture is a more open-ended, flexible term for neo-evolutionists, the idea of a bounded, homogeneous ‘people’ is replaced with the term population, which must be defined by complex cultural contexts in which defined groups lived together. Still, whether neo-evolutionist, structural post-processualist, or culture historian (historical processualists do not subscribe to this), members of these schools see culture as the shared mental or cognitive maps of ancient populations in various places and times. These mental maps defined the ancients’ view of the world, both the secular and the sacred, established their identity, and determined how they organised politically, socially, and economically. At another level there were mental maps that provided the ancients with guidelines for how to make houses, pots, or tools and potential styles to incorporate into artefacts as expressions of cultural meanings (style here consists of elements of shape or decoration that go beyond the function or the technical process of manufacture of an artefact). In many ways these shared mental maps are the basis for the Russian culture historical concept of ‘a culture.’ The word ‘corpus’ would be more likely to be used by neo-evolutionists and post-procesualists for artifactual culture, but except for its bound- edness the concept for the purpose of discussing ritual is not so far apart. Deep differences in interpretation of change arise when speaking of the processes of development, but that is not so important for our discussion here. This article then focuses on one aspect of those mental maps, ritual, for the Kura-Araxes cultural tradition in a common way. As such, two cultural aspects are at issue: (1) the role of ritual in understanding the organisation and evolution of particular societies within the Kura-Araxes cultural tradition, and (2) ways of defining the similarities and differences (the connections) among different societies within the tradition. The focus here therefore is ultimately the greater cultural tradition called, alternatively, Kura- Araxes, Early Transcaucasian, Shengavitian, Karaz, Pulur, or Khirbet Kerak. Its geographic focus is the Shengavit mound and related sites as representatives of that tradition. 4 Hodder 1986, pp. 63ff. 5 Rothman 2004. 97958.indb 2 19/06/15 09:32 REGARDING RITUAL BEHAVIOUR AT SHENGAVIT, ARMENIA 3 We still have a long way to go to understand the Kura-Araxes cultural tradition. Despite decades of excavation, largely by Soviet archaeologists, “we do not have a clear understanding of what the Kura-Araxes actually is … To date, we know frustratingly little about the social world of Kura-Araxes … communities.”6 Most evidence of this tradition is found in the moun- tainous regions of the Near East from approximately 3500 to 2450 BC. The Kura-Araxes cultural tradition has been identified by a corpus of handmade, black-burnished pottery often with a contrasting interior surface colour (red is one common example). Looked at in contrast to other cultural traditions in the larger region, this pottery seems to indicate a cultural homogeneity both in the supposed homeland, in the area of modern Armenia, Azerbaijan (Nachiçevan), Georgia, and northeastern Turkey, and among groups of migrants in a huge diaspora extending across the Taurus Mountain front7 and southwest into the northern Jordan Valley near the Sea of Galilee,8 southeast into the Zagros Mountains around Lake Urmia to the Kangavar Valley,9 across the littoral south of the Caspian Sea10, and north into Daghestan and the North Caucasus (Fig. 1).11 These cultural elements have led many scholars to see these societies as distinct and separate from the groups that surrounded them or among whom they lived. Researchers also have tended to conflate the entire millennium or more that is associated with the Kura-Araxes as if it were one single cultural manifestation. But new evidence raises questions as to whether either assumption is true.12 We, the authors of this article, have concluded that, in fact, there is a core of shared identity among Kura-Araxes populations, but also significant variations. Hence, the Kura-Araxes was a cultural tradition shared by those in the homeland and migrants, the latter of whom were in effect ethnic groups in the diaspora. This is clear even if we limit ourselves to pottery style. As Sagona noticed in 1984,13 and as others looking at the Kura-Araxes case continue to affirm,14 “problems of interpretation are further exacerbated by the distinct regional variants of this ‘cultural-historical community’.”15 Some researchers point to what they believe are contempo- raneous differences in style zones within the supposed homeland. For example, for Armenia Badalyan and Smith propose two periods of Kura-Araxes occupation (Early Bronze I and II), but they assert that there were at least three distinct stylistic groupings in pottery.16 Two of those, Karnut-Shengavit and Shresh-Mokhra Blur, were coterminous according to Badalyan and Smith.17 These variants they argue represented groups living in different environmental zones. At the same time, petrographic analysis of clays and tempering from far away Beth Yeraḥ (Khirbet 6 Smith 2005, pp. 258–260. 7 Rothman 2003; Batiuk and Rothman 2005; Sagona 1984, 1994. 8 Greenberg et al. 2012. 9 Rothman 2011. 10 Fahimi 2006. 11 Kohl 2007. 12 Frangipane and Palumbi 2007; Sagona 2014. 13 Sagona 1984. 14 Rothman and Kozbe 1997; Palumbi 2008. 15 Kohl 2007, p. 89. 16 Smith et al. 2009. 17 Smith et al. 2009. 97958.indb 3 19/06/15 09:32 4 H. SIMONYAN – M.S. ROTHMAN Fig. 1. Distribution map of extent of the Kura Araxes cultural tradition. Kerak) in the southern Levant, and Kura-Araxes sites of the fourth and third millennia in Armenia,18 indicate a common tradition of pottery manufacture that spanned hundreds of years and as many kilometres.19 Still, there is room for considerable debate on the meaning of style. Of the two authors of this paper Simonyan believes that the Kura-Araxes constituted a single socio-economic unit across its entire extent.

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