2015/12/19 19:16 Antiquity Journal 1/3 ページ http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/nishiaki348 Search Antiquity Click to enlarge Figure 1. Map showing the location of Hacı Elamxanlı Tepe and related Neolithic sites in the southern Caucasus. Click to enlarge Figure 2. General view of Hacı Elamxanlı Tepe facing north. Click to enlarge The origins of food production in the southern Caucasus: excavations at Hacı Elamxanlı Tepe, Azerbaijan Yoshihiro Nishiaki, Farhad Guliyev & Seiji Kadowaki Introduction Over the past decade, great advances have been made in research on Neolithisation processes in the southern Caucasus. One such achievement involves the dating of the emergence of a full-fledged, food-producing economy, which is now assigned to the beginning of the sixth millennium BC (Nishiaki et al. 2015a). The southern Caucasian communities were situated directly to the north of the Fertile Crescent, where a food- producing economy emerged as early as the tenth millennium BC; the apparently late adoption of such an economy in the neighbouring southern Caucasus poses intriguing questions as to the environmental and social contexts that led to this great cultural change. The introduction of a food-producing economy in this region is associated with the Shomutepe-Shulaveri culture (Pottery Neolithic; Narimanov 1987). Although a number of settlements of this culture have been discovered since the 1960s, the absence of a rigorous chronological framework has been an obstacle to the determination of the contexts in which it emerged and developed. A key site through which to investigate this issue is Hacı Elamxanlı Tepe, located in the Middle Kura Valley, west Azerbaijan (Figure 1). Excavations: the 2012–2015 seasons Hacı Elamxanlı Tepe is a small mound of approximately 60 × 80 × 2m, situated around 8km east of Tovuz (Figure 2). It was discovered in 2011 during a field survey conducted by the Azerbaijan-Japan archaeological mission to Göytepe, one of the largest Neolithic settlements of the Shomutepe-Shulaveri culture (Guliyev & Nishiaki 2012, 2014; Kadowaki et al. 2015). The surface finds at Hacı Elamxanlı Tepe yielded extremely few pottery sherds but abundant Neolithic flaked stone artefacts, thereby suggesting an earlier Neolithic date. Excavations conducted during 2012–2015 confirmed this initial assessment (Nishiaki et al. 2015b, in press). A series of radiocarbon dates firmly situate the four architectural levels within a short time period of 5950– 5800 cal BC, thus placing it earlier than other dated Shomutepe-Shulaveri sites in the Middle Kura Valley (Nishiaki et al. 2015a). At the same time, the associated archaeological records show evidence of full cereal and animal domestication, along with a unique set of cultural remains that differ from those documented at later settlements such as Göytepe. The archaeological finds Excavation identified a mud-brick structure with a distinct plan resembling HOME CURRENT ISSUE ANTIQUITY+ ARCHIVE CONTRIBUTE SUBSCRIBE CONTACT