1 EASTERN ANATOLIA IN THE EARLY BRONZE AGE by Catherine Marro Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique UMR 5133 « Archéorient : Environnements et Sociétés du Proche-Orient Ancien », Lyon, FRANCE. The Early Bronze Age in Eastern Anatolia is in many ways an enigma. To apprehend it fully, it would seem necessary to venture beyond the strictly chronological and geographical limits suggested by the title of this chapter. In short, one has to take into consideration the material assemblages coming from the South Caucasus, Western Iran, the Northern Levant and Central Anatolia, as well as to extend our analysis well into the Chalcolithic period. This situation partly results from methodological issues – the earlier stage of the Kuro- Araxes culture, to which East Anatolian Early Bronze Age cultures are linked, being considered as part of the « Chalcolithic » period by several Russian and Caucasian colleagues. But this situation also reflects the cultural complexity that characterizes the whole region, at the dawn of urban civilization in the Syro-Mesopotamian lowlands. To cut a long story short, East Anatolian Bronze Age cultures are involved in long-term, inter-regional developments, which reveal complex relationships between lowland-focused (the Ubaid and later, the Uruk phenomenon) and highland-focused cultural entities (the Chaff-Faced ware horizon and the Kuro-Araxes world). At the other end of this timespan, it would also be shortsighted to assess the Early Bronze cultures of Eastern Anatolia without considering their posterity in the Middle Bronze Age, so close their links may sometimes be with the following assemblages in the first half of the second millennium. The resulting picture is that of a long and complex evolution spanning more than two thousand years : the study of the whole region would in fact encompass the Late Chalcolithic, the Early Bronze and the Middle Bronze Age. However, as this study focuses on Eastern Anatolia, it is mostly the Early Bronze Age that will be dealt with here. During the period that for most scholars is recognized as the « Early Bronze Age » (ca. 3100-2100 BC), Eastern Anatolia was thus occupied by an intriguing cultural complex related to the Kuro-Araxes culture as it has been described by Kuftin after his excavations in Transcaucasia (Kuftin 1941). This complex has alternatively been called « Karaz », « Red- Black-Burnished » or « Early Transcaucasian » depending on the viewpoint adopted by successive scholars. Of all the labels used for describing the Early Bronze Age faciès of Eastern Anatolia, the term « Early Transcaucasian Culture » (« ETC »), originally coined by Ch. Burney, seems to be the most appropriate, as it implies an organic relationship between East Anatolian cultural assemblages and Transcaucasia. And indeed, even if this issue may still be a matter of debate, today most of the evidence points to a Transcaucasian origin for the East Anatolian Early Bronze Age.