Bones In Bronze Age Armenia Uncover A Strange Story

S. Mathur

 

It sounds like the perfect script for a sci-fi/ fantasy novel. A ruthless ruler under siege in his fortress, trying to keep his crumbling power intact through the divine gift of prophecy. Even as diviners cast the bones, the fortress is overrun and destroyed; the defenders forced to flee, or captured and killed. The whole truth will perhaps never be known but the story archaeologists are uncovering on the Tsaghkahovit Plain in central Armenia is stranger and more exciting than fiction.

Study Backs 5th-Century Historian’s Date for Founding of Armenia

Nicholas Wade

 

Movses Khorenatsi, a historian in the fifth century, wrote that his native Armenia had been established in 2492 B.C., a date usually regarded as legendary though he claimed to have traveled to Babylon and consulted ancient records. (*) But either he made a lucky guess or he really did gain access to useful data, because a new genomic analysis suggests that his date is entirely plausible.

Geneticists have scanned the genomes of 173 Armenians from Armenia and Lebanon and compared them with those of 78 other populations from around the world. They found that the Armenians are a mix of ancient populations whose descendants now live in Sardinia, Central Asia and several other regions. This formative mixture occurred from 3000 to 2000 B.C., the geneticists calculated, coincident with Movses Khorenatsi’s date for the founding of Armenia.

Archaeologist 'Digs' Using Drone for Fieldwork in Armenia

Amy Patterson Neubert

 

A Purdue University archaeologist is utilizing drone technology to capture details and data from Bronze Age field sites in Armenia.

"Drones are a new tool in archaeologists' toolkits," said Ian Lindsay, an associate professor of anthropology who has been excavating in the South Caucasus region for 15 years. "It's a good alternative to kites, balloons or sitting in the bucket of a crane with a camera trying to visually document these ancient sites. Drones offer a detailed aerial perspective that we've never had before, and by leveraging this technology archaeologists can be more efficient in the field as drones give us an immediate sense of spatial science scale useful for planning excavation."