Archaeological supplement A to Damgaard et al. 2018: Archaeology of the Caucasus, Anatolia, Central and South Asia 4000-1500 BCE AUTHORS Kristian Kristiansen 1 , Brian Hemphill 2 , Gojko Barjamovic 3 , Sachihiro Omura 4 , Süleyman Yücel Senyurt 5 , Vyacheslav Moiseyev 6 , Andrey Gromov 6 , Fulya Eylem Yediay 7 , Habib Ahmad 8,9 , Abdul Hameed 10 , Abdul Samad 11 , Nazish Gul 8 , Muhammad Hassan Khokhar 12 , and Peter de Barros Damgaard 13 . AFFILIATIONS 1 Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, 40530 Göteborg, Sweden. 2 Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, USA. 3 Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, USA. 4 Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology, Kaman, Kırşehir, Turkey. 5 Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Arts, Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey. 6 Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) RAS, Russia. 7 The Institute of Forensic Sciences, Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey. 8 Department of Genetics, Hazara University, Garden Campus, Mansehra, Pakistan. 9 Islamia University, Peshawar, Pakistan. 10 Department of Archeology, Hazara University, Garden Campus, Mansehra, Pakistan. 11 Directorate of Archaeology and Museums Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. 12 Archaeological Museum Harappa at Archaeology Department Govt. of Punjab, Pakistan. 13 Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum, University of Copenhagen. ABSTRACT We present a brief archaeological summary of the main phases of cultural and social change in the Western, Central, and South Asia ca. 4000-1500 BCE as a contextual framework for the findings presented in Damgaard et al. 2018. We stress the role of the Caucasus as a conduit in Western Asia linking the steppe and Eastern Europe with Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. We track the emergence of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in Central Asia as a cultural melting pot between the steppe and the sown lands during a period of more than a millennium. And we highlight indicators of cultural and commercial exchange, tracking developments in technology as well as social and political organization that came about as part of complex processes of interaction in a region stretching from South Asia to the Mediterranean.