Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics: Rethinking Temporality and Community in Eurasian Archaeology [1 ed.] 9789004325470, 9789004324978

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Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004325470_001

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Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics Rethinking Temporality and Community in Eurasian Archaeology Edited by

Kathryn O. Weber Emma Hite Lori Khatchadourian Adam T. Smith

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover illustration: Eighteenth-century representation of a Kalmyk camp from Sammlungen Historischer Nachrichten über die Mongolischen Völkerschaften by Peter S. Pallas, St. Petersburg 1776. Mason N 147, Theil 1, Tab. 1. With kind permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weber, Kathryn O., editor of compilation. | Hite, Emma, editor of compilation. | Khatchadourian, Lori, 1975- editor of compilation. | Smith, Adam T., editor of compilation. Title: Fitful histories and unruly publics : rethinking temporality and community in Eurasian archaeology / edited by Kathryn O. Weber, Emma Hite, Lori Khatchadourian, Adam T. Smith. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016033202 (print) | LCCN 2016042340 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004324978 (hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004325470 (e-book) | ISBN 9789004325470 (E-book) Subjects: LCSH: Eurasia--Antiquities. | Asia, Central--Antiquities. | Eurasia--Social life and customs. | Time--Social aspects--Eurasia--History--To 1500. | Community life--Eurasia--History--To 1500. | Social archaeology--Eurasia. | Archaeology--Research--Eurasia. Classification: LCC DS328 .F58 2016 (print) | LCC DS328 (ebook) | DDC 958/.01--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033202

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. isbn 978-90-04-32497-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32547-0 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Contents

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Contents

List of Figures and Table vii List of Contributors ix



Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics: An Introduction 1 Adam T. Smith, Kathryn O. Weber, Emma Hite and Lori Khatchadourian

Part 1 Making Time: Constructed Temporalities and Foregone Futures 1

Tin and Oil: Can We Foresee the Future through the Remote Past? 15 Mikheil Abramishvili

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Tempus Interruptus: Archaeological Explanation and the Unraised Columns of Oğlanqala Period III 32 Hilary Gopnik

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One Eye Forward, One Eye Back: Multiple Temporalities, Community, and Social Change in the Culture History of the Southern Urals, Russian Federation (2100–1300 bc) 56 James A. Johnson

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Echoes in Eternity: Social Memory and Mortuary Stone Monuments in Bronze-Iron Age Mongolia 80 Erik G. Johannesson

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Paths, Pathos, and Portables: Nomadic Culture and Materiality of Movement in the Black Lands of Kalmykia 109 Irina Shingiray

Part 2 Culture and Counter-Culture: Practice, Place, and Eurasian Prehistory 6

Long-Term Occupation and Seasonal Mobility in Mongolia: A Comparative Study of Two Mobile Pastoralist Communities 155 Jean-Luc Houle

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Chapter 1

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Bronze Age Communities and Potting Techniques along the Kazakh Steppe Fringe 175 Paula N. Doumani Dupuy

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Settlement Mobility and the Politics of Ritual among Late Bronze Age Fortress Communities: Recent Findings from the Site of Tsaghkahovit, Armenia 190 Ian Lindsay

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Explaining the Kura-Araxes 217 Mitchell S Rothman

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Land of the Unrule-ables: Bactria in the Achaemenid Period 258 Xin Wu

Part 3 Timelessness and the Politics of the Past 11

Unruly Remains: Ethnogenesis and Physical Anthropology in the South Caucasus 291 Maureen E. Marshall

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Chinese Autochthony and the Eurasian Context: Archaeology, Mythmaking and Johan Gunnar Andersson’s “Western Origins” 303 Magnus Fiskesjö

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Orientalism in Russia: The Caucasus, Historical Narrative and the Formation of a National Identity 321 Kathryn O. Weber



Index 341

List of Figures List of Figures and Tableand Table

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List of Figures and Table 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2

Figures Map of Transcaucasia with Achaemenid and Hellenistic sites 33 Column drums, plinths, and bases lying on sloping fill 35 Reconstructed stone columns with plinths and Attic-type bases 36 Campaniform bases with double torus: a. as excavated b. reconstructed 37 Reconstructed plan of Period III palace 38 Map of the Eurasian steppe 63 Map of the southern Urals 66 The Middle/Late Bronze Age settlement of Ust’ye 69 Dispersed settlement patterning from the Middle to Late Bronze Age in the northwest Kizil’skoye region, southern Urals 71 Dispersed settlement patterning from the Middle to Late Bronze Age in the Uy River valley, southern Urals 71 Viewsheds of the largest Late Bronze Age settlements in the: a. Uy River valley and b. the northwest area of the Kizil’skoye region along the Zingekya River 72 Talc tempered and non-talc tempered sherds 74 Khirigsuurs 87 Deer stones and Shape-burials 89 Early Iron Age mortuary monuments 92 Xiongnu mortuary monuments 96 The Black Lands Landscape 113 Eighteenth-century representation of a Kalmyk camp 133 Eighteenth-century representations of the interior of a portable felt house 134 Remains of a wooden saddle from the Ulan-Tolga kurgan in Kalmykia 136 Needlework examples of Kalmyk ornaments 138 An eroded “portable” burial from the site of Artezian in the Black Lands 141 Map of Mongolia showing Khanuy Valley and Khoton Lake study areas 157 Habitation sites near Khoton Lake, western Mongolia 163 KLS1 multicomponent habitation site 164 Multicomponent habitation sites in Khanuy Valley, northcentral Mongolia 166 Map of Semirech’ye showing the Dzhungar Mountain range with the location of Tasbas 177 Landscape of Tasbas 179

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Late/Final Bronze Age decorated pottery examples from the Tasbas settlement 180 Late/Final Bronze Age ceramic jars from the Tasbas settlement 181 Typical ornament combinations found on ceramics deposited in settlements of the Sargary-Alekseevka culture group 182 Map of Late Bronze Age/Iron 1 fortress sites in and around the Tsaghkahovit Plain 192 Plan view of the Tsaghkahovit Residential Complex operations 202 Overview of Operation SLT 14 203 Profile photo of floor levels in south baulk of Operation SLT 14 204 Late Bronze Age shrines (Operation T2E) on the western terrace of Gegharot Fortress 207 Distribution of Kura-Araxes cultural tradition 218 Chronological schemes for Kura-Araxes and neighboring areas 220 Kura-Araxes pottery 222 Distribution of Kura-Araxes pottery styles: a) distribution of Sagona style groups in Kura-Araks II, b) distribution of Sagona style groups in Kura-Araks III, c) distribution of pottery decoration, line dimple, and groove, in Kura Araks III period  224, 226 Ritual spaces at Shengavit and Pulur 242 Map showing Kyzyltepa and other sites mentioned in the chapter 267 Preliminary plan of Kyzyltepa showing the settlement’s main features 272 Preliminary plan of the Kyzyltepa Citadel 274 Trench I on the eastern mound of the Kyzyltepa Citadel 276 Arrowheads recovered from the foot of the face of the Citadel’s eastern wall 278 Trace of fire at the end of Phase 2, on the western mound of the Kyzyltepa Citadel 278 Yangshao ceramic vessel lid in the shape of a human head (of a shaman figure?), obtained by Andersson in Gansu Province, Northwest China, in 1923-24 307 Andersson’s initial comparison of ceramic designs from Yangshao, north China, with those of Anau and Tripolje in far western Eurasia 308

7.4 7.5 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4

9.5 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 12.1

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Table Differences between Xiongnu tombs and preceding monuments 98

List of Contributors List of Contributors

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List of Contributors Mikheil Abramishvili is curator of the Tbilisi Archaeological Museum, chairman of the Tbilisi Ar­­ chaeological Society, and director of the Tbilisi archaeological expedition. His scholarly interests comprise the emergence and development of ancient metallurgy, relations between the South Caucasus and the Near East and Aegean during the Bronze Age, and transitions in ancient and modern socio-economic and political systems. Paula N. Doumani Dupuy is a postdoctoral fellow at Christian Albrechts Universität zu-Kiel, Institute of Pre- and Proto Historic Archaeology. Her research examines the long-term development and transfer of ceramic, textile, and agricultural technologies in central Eurasia during prehistory. Magnus Fiskesjö is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell Uni­ versity. In 2000-2005 he served as director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, Sweden. He is an anthropologist, archaeologist, and Asianist. Hilary Gopnik is Instructor of Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Principal Scientist at Emory University and the co-director of the archaeological site of Oğlanqala in Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan. Emma Hite is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and a visiting scholar at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology. Her dissertation research examines the human-animal relationships of the Xiongnu Empire and their role in the internal political dynamics of the empire in central Mongolia. Jean-Luc Houle is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western Kentucky University. His research interests and methodological foci include regional settlement patterns, household archaeology, spatial analysis, and the development of early complex societies among mobile pastoralists in East Asia and the Eurasian steppe region.

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Erik G. Johannesson is a Senior Archaeologist at Lifeways of Canada Ltd. He is a mortuary and landscape archaeologist with over 15 years of field and research experience in Mongolia, Russia, Greece, and the North American prairie. James A. Johnson is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His primary research interests focus on the breakdown of urban formations and the afterlife of socio-political traditions. Lori Khatchadourian is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University and the author of Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the Archaeology of Empires (California 2016). She co-directs the Joint Armenian-American Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian So­­ cieties (Project ArAGATS). Ian Lindsay is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University. He has written extensively on Late Bronze Age political dynamics and mobile pastoralism in the South Caucasus. He is a co-director of the long-standing Armenian-American Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Socie­ ties (Project ArAGATS) and president of the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus. Maureen E. Marshall is a bioarchaeologist whose research focuses on the Bronze and Iron Ages of the South Caucasus and is Associate Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center (REEEC) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mitchell S Rothman is Chair and Professor of Anthropology at Widener University. His early interest was the origin of states in Mesopotamia. His books Chiefdoms and Early States in the Near East (with Gil Stein), Tepe Gawra: The Evolution of a Small Prehistoric Center in Northern Iraq, and Uruk Mesopotamia and its Neighbors represent this work. In recent years his interest has extended to contemporary societies and cultures with contrasting evolutionary pathways in the mountains of the Zagros, Taurus and South Caucasus. His contributions to On the High Road: The History of Godin Tepe, Iran (with Hilary Gopnik) led to his latest project on the Kura-Araxes site of Shengavit (Armenia) with Hakob Simonyan.

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Irina Shingiray is a post-doctoral fellow at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford, where she is a member of the project on “Nomadic Empires: A World-Historical Perspective.” Using interdisciplinary sources (archaeology, anthropology, history, and landscape studies), her research focuses on the Khazar Empire as viewed from the nomadic perspective. Adam T. Smith is Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of An­thropology at Cornell University. He is the author of The Political Machine: Assembling Sovereignty in the Bronze Age Caucasus (Princeton 2015) and The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities (Cali­ fornia 2003).  He is a co-founder of the joint Armenian-American Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS). Kathryn O. Weber is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell Uni­ versity and an archaeological anthropologist studying social inequality in the Bronze Age South Caucasus through the lens of human-animal relationships and isotope analysis. Wu Xin is lecturer in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published on the relations of Central Asia and the Achaemenid Empire. “‘O Young Man … Make Known of What Kind You Are’: Warfare, History, and Elite Ideology of the Achaemenid Persian Empire,” Iranica Antiqua, 2014 (XLIX): 209-299 represents her effort to bring Central Asia into the big picture of the Empire. She is the co-director of the UzbekAmerican Joint Expedition at Kyzyltepa.

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Fitful Histories andPublics Unruly Publics: An Introduction Fitful Histories and Unruly

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Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics: An Introduction Adam T. Smith, Kathryn O. Weber, Emma Hite and Lori Khatchadourian Two overarching themes draw together the contributions in this book. The first concerns the social construction of temporal experience across the Eurasian landmass from antiquity to the present. “Fitful histories” captures this dimension of the volume, referring as it does to the unsynchronized relationship between the regular rhythms of everyday life and the more disjointed moments of historical transformation that precludes a smooth and steady reckoning of time. Any such inquiry also entails a sustained examination of archaeology’s own epistemologies for assaying historicity. Temporality is rarely an independent variable in Eurasian archaeology. Instead, it has been traditionally yoked to an orderly imagination of culture and ethnos. With historical process restricted to the macro-scale, transformation can, in effect, only occur through dramatic upheavals that punctuate timeless eras of sociocultural continuity and political stasis. The second theme of this volume is a critical reappraisal of the normative understanding of culture that continues to haunt Eurasian archaeology. The canonical heuristics used to classify common material assemblages across space slip all too easily into putatively uniform social collectives, leaving monolithic archaeological cultures to endure across long phases of conservative sociocultural reproduction. The effect is not only to render peoples within each phase as truly “without history” in Eric Wolf’s1 phrase, stripped of the layered temporal experiences and sensibilities of social life, but to pacify them as agents of historical transformation. But what of the forces of difference and contestation, produced in the perceptible engagements of peoples, things, and places that make social life as it is lived rather more unruly than such heuristics allow? This volume aims to re-evaluate traditional accounts of the region’s (pre)history at varying temporal and spatial scales and to examine the often unruly publics that underlay seemingly monolithic cultural blocs. Attending to Eurasia’s fitful histories and unruly publics from an archaeological perspective entails reconceptualizing the articulation of monuments, landscapes, bodies, and materials in the production of temporal and cultural logics. The papers in this volume were originally brought together in October 2012 as part 1 Wolf 1982.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004325470_002

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of the Fourth Conference on Eurasian Archaeology held at Cornell University. Represented at that gathering were 70 international scholars and over 50 paper presentations. Yet the book is not a conference proceeding; instead, it brings together select contributions that adhere closely to the thematic concerns of the conference. Previous volumes resulting from these conferences include The Archaeology of Power and Politics in Eurasia: Regimes and Revolutions,2 Social Orders and Social Landscapes,3 and Beyond the Steppe and the Sown.4 The conference would have been unthinkable without the enthusiasm and support of the student organizing committee, which developed the theme, organized the sessions, and hosted the event. Kathryn Weber and Emma Hite led the committee that included Hannah Chazin, Jeffrey Leon, Catherine Kearns, and Jake Nabel. This book is divided into three thematic sections. Part I, entitled “Making Time: Constructed Temporalities and Foregone Futures,” re-examines the traditional culture-historical temporal frame that has defined the archaeology of Eurasia, like many other regions of the world, for over a century. The chapters in Part II, entitled “Culture and Counter-Culture: Practice, Place, and Eurasian Prehistory,” question the essence of the relationship between material culture and identity, asking what embodied routines distinguish particular communities from their broader cultural context, and what it means for community to be constituted in the shared enactment of practice. The chapters in Part III, entitled “Timelessness and the Politics of the Past,” explore the intersection of temporality and politics in the production of archaeological knowledge, and their impact on the dominant tropes of Eurasia’s historical narratives, such as nationalism, state authority, and the creation of cultural communities.

Making Time: Constructed Temporalities and Foregone Futures

Taken together, these contributions provide a broad set of conceptual pathways for rethinking temporality across the Eurasian landmass. With roots deep in the formalist traditions of Spitsyn5 and others, Eurasia’s past has been parceled into a mosaic cartography of culturally homogeneous geographic spaces, marching in a stentorian order of temporal succession, where long eras of continuity are punctuated by moments of material rupture. This approach has 2 3 4 5

Hartley et al. 2012. Popova et al. 2007. Peterson et al. 2006. Spitsyn 1889.

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served quite well in imposing a taxonomic order upon a vast territory across millennia – no small intellectual achievement. However, it has also occluded alternative temporalities – from the micro-rhythms of communal migration to the macro histories of global geopolitics, each of which transcend the hard edges presumed by traditional theorizations of the culture area. The section opens with Mikheil Abramishvili’s probing examination of parallels between the end of the Bronze Age and the coming end of our own “age of oil.” At the heart of Abramishvili’s eye-opening analysis is the observation that, like iron ores, the coming critical resources of the post-oil era are difficult to monopolize. Wind, solar, and other non petroleum-based energy sources are broadly available (even though the technology to exploit these sources is not always evenly distributed). For Abramishvili, this situation bears more than a passing resemblance to the situation in the Near East at the end of the Bronze Age. Tin alloyed bronze, he notes, was rather limited in availability and, hence, Late Bronze Age production and consumption were built upon a political economy of scarcity mediated by vital long-distance trade routes. When these routes came under threat, it was not simply a regime of production at risk, but an entire geopolitical system that had long privileged polities able to dominate exchange in rare materials. The iron trade, in contrast, was difficult to monopolize as it was not reliant upon vast networks of exchange. Production centers could multiply, exchange networks could shorten, and consumption patterns could broaden to a host of new social and geographic locations. The parallels with our era are trenchant and thought provoking, even as the social disruption that attended the end of the Bronze Age provides us with a sobering cautionary tale. But Abramishvili’s analysis is not simply a tale of history repeating itself; his is an account of folding temporalities constructed out of the politics of material resources, and competing forces of monopolization and proliferation. In other words, temporality is not independent of materiality. On the contrary, temporal rhythms are fundamentally shaped by human relations to the material world. Hilary Gopnik’s examination of the peculiar history of an unfinished early Hellenistic building at the site of Oğlanqala in Naxçıvan, Azerbaijan, speaks to the material production of another kind of temporality: anachronism. In one sense, the plurality of stylistic sources at play in the building – Urartian, Achaemenid, Hellenistic – lifted the building (and its creators) out of any particular history, to embed them in a kind of timeless and placeless eternity. In another sense, the building’s incompleteness placed the structure within a highly particular and very local set of historical relations. Hence, Oğlanqala seems to have been produced as “a place in between,” but also a place both within and outside of history. The intentional, if uncompleted, production of a

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building conspicuous in its temporal diversity reminds us that anachronism is a powerful tool for folding the past into the present. Anachronism is one form of what James Johnson calls “time-consciousness.” Johnson interrogates the traditional historical temporality that has long organized Eurasian culture-history and argues for an expanded awareness of the flow of time during the transition from the Middle to Late Bronze Age in the southern Urals. In particular, he points to evidence of variability in material rupture and continuity: settlements shifted, but the mortuary landscape was not radically altered. This balance between tradition and innovation, Johnson suggests, represents a self-conscious effort to mitigate the risks of broad social transformation through the curation of select, historically sedimented practices. Such awareness points to an acute sensitivity to possible futures within Bronze Age communities, an understanding of the contingencies involved in large-scale social change, and an ability to simultaneously fold together multiple temporalities that articulate past, present, and future. The Bronze Age Urals provide modern archaeology with a critical lesson in historiography that offers considerable scope for enriching traditional temporalities of Eurasian culture-history. Gopnik and Johnson’s mutual interest in the imbrication of past and present raises the pressing issue of memory and the social conditions of its production and reproduction, an issue that Erik Johannesson takes up in his chapter. Focused on the mortuary landscapes of Bronze and Iron Age Mongolia, Johannesson’s study examines memorialization at three scales: the micro, the meso, and the macro. What is compelling in his analysis is the variability in the scale of memory work over time. He concludes that Late Bronze Age commemorative practices in Mongolia centered on the building of monuments that projected social memory outwards, producing a dynamic and highly visible ritual landscape. Where Bronze Age communities enacted commemoration through meso-scale constructions (such as khirigsuurs), Early Iron Age mortuary features (both slab burials and kurgans) indicate an increased concern with grave inventories and other micro-scale commemorative practices. This shift toward increased emphasis on micro-scalar mortuary practice culminates in Xiongnu tombs, which appear to have less prominence on the landscape and significant labor investment focused on subterranean construction. Johannesson’s suggestion that new scales of memorialization articulate with new regimes of value and, hence, novel political strategies, focuses attention on the production of place and the flows of human communities across landscapes. It is the power of movement that Irina Shingiray takes up in her examination of medieval pastoral nomads in the Black Lands of the North

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Caucasus. Rather than focusing on a labor theory of value, Shingiray interrogates the aesthetics of mobility: the implication of spatial movement in shifting affective fields of loss and return, distance and proximity. The medieval Black Lands were, she concludes, a densely populated “relationscape” filled with spirits and ancestors, myths and memories. This folding of the past into the present created an affectively rich terrain that set movement from place to place within complex emotional registers of joy and fear. The affective landscape was simultaneously a relentlessly material one, tied directly to a political economy of regulation, standardization, and order. As Shingiray concludes, the relationscape of the Black Lands drew together cycles of time and patterns of space, deep wells of affective feeling, and pragmatic concern for material and spiritual “health of the community.” These chapters work from the broadly global to the intensely local in order to uncover the material relations that constitute transformative social reorderings of relations between past, present, and future. In so doing, they necessarily train our attention directly on the object matter that shapes not only memory and memorialization but also the field of possible futures.

Culture and Counter-Culture: Practice, Place, and Eurasian Prehistory

Contributions in this section focus on the interplay of local forces in the context of broad, regional regimes of cultural practice or imperial power. The archaeological subjects of these chapters challenge the homogenizing capacity of cultural and political forces. It is readily apparent that material culture recovered at a local level requires regional context, placing behaviors and practices within a larger framework, but these chapters remind us that regional narratives are also, inevitably, complicated by local realities. Houle explores the relationship between mobility, complex social organization, and place-making, focusing on the difference between two mobile pastoralist populations in central and western Mongolia during the Bronze and Iron Ages. He emphasizes the importance of face-to-face contact in the transmission and maintenance of community groups. Community in this account is composed through the construction of durable monuments on the landscape, but “supra-local” community was possible because of certain temporal pattern of settlement. Houle argues that complex social organization arose during the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Khanuy Valley of central Mongolia, in contrast to the Khoton Lake region in western Mongolia, through an intersection of favorable environmental conditions and stability of intense

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occupation. Similar acts of memorialization in the Bronze Age reflected very different modes of engaging with the landscape and with each other. The construction of place related to patterns of mobility, but these places could either forge communal integration or simply act as landmarks of memorialization. Houle urges us to question our assumptions about the archaeological signatures of residential mobility. Ian Lindsay is also concerned with the links between political association and ritually significant places. He places the site of Tsaghkahovit (in north central Armenia) in the context of both regional and local forces, the tension at their intersection produced by the relationship between political authorities and a more mobile subject population. An understanding of the archaeological record, in this account, requires the simultaneous consideration of these different scales and communities. According to Lindsay, pastoralism was not simply a subsistence method, but in fact an expression of social identity that served to bind disparate communities in a common political order. Like Houle, Lindsay argues that the seasonal return to places worked to produce allegiance and establish a sense of permanence, thus integrating groups of pastoralists. However, here the focus is on routinization, or the creation of a rhythmic sense of temporality. Lindsay makes the case that activities at Tsaghkahovit worked simultaneously to establish a communal sense of unity and a system of authority. Paula Doumani Dupuy looks at the persistence of particular technological procedures, namely the transmission of decorative styles in Tasbas ceramic production, to argue compellingly that such consistency reflects a population with a “shared sense of group membership.” While this community shared certain similarities (such as agricultural technology) with the inhabitants of an extensive geographic area, the analysis of the ceramics shows local distinctions. Again, as in Houle’s account, the stability of interaction makes these local practices key to social integration. In both of these narratives, the sharing of practices and technologies affirms and constitutes community, rather than arising from a putative a priori group membership. It is through the practices associated with the technological process, from the selection of clay sources to the point of pot manufacture, that locally embedded knowledge was transmitted intergenerationally over extended periods of time, and that collective identity at Tasbas was constituted. Time is central to these accounts, not only in terms of persistence, but in terms of sustained intensity. Mitchell Rothman also focuses on the relationship between space, time, and the social, but seeks an explanation for the temporally and geographically extensive material culture called the Kura-Araxes. The key question here is how such a geographically dispersed population could have managed to maintain fairly consistent material practices over such a

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long period of time. He argues that the term Kura-Araxes refers to more than a period and less than a homogeneous culture, instead asserting that the Kura-Araxes is a shared cultural tradition practiced within many widespread communities and reflecting the ethnic identity of its practitioners. He suggests that the spread of Kura-Araxes cultural materials throughout the greater Near East was the result of small groups belonging to this ethnic community emigrating from their traditional homeland in the South Caucasus, following economic opportunities (the possibilities include metal, wine, or wool). Thus Rothman suggests that the disappearance of Kura-Araxes material is likely the result of later assimilation. Wu Xin looks at the political component of the relationship between local practices and broader regional forces in an explicitly imperialist context. The site of Kyzyltepa speaks to the local impact of the integration of Bactria into the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Rather than a unidirectional process of external, imperial influence on the local site, Wu describes a negotiation of interests visible in the archaeological record. Bactria was embedded in the Achaemenid Empire not only (or even primarily) by force, but by administrative travel, the sharing of labor and troops and, importantly, the mobilization of claims to authority within the empire by Bactrian elites. In turn, support came from the Achaemenid imperial apparatus in the form of the extension of road systems and aid for construction of fortification. The site of Kyzyltepa, as a likely administrative center constructed at the frontier of the empire and on the border between different economic zones, was a clear expression of imperial investment in Bactria. Ongoing hostility towards the settlement combined with the resilience of its inhabitants suggests a complicated relationship between Bactria and the empire, which the documentary record elides. By offering a glimpse into the complex relationship between Bactria and the foreign powers that dominated it at a particular historical moment, the chapter challenges narratives of timeless socio-cultural continuity. Unsurprising for a volume focusing on the archaeology of Eurasia, many of this section’s chapters touch upon the relationship between mobile pastoralism and the archaeological record, focusing on the seeming contradiction between seasonal occupation as part of a mobile mode of life and social investment in place. Houle emphasizes the difference between place-making and place-using, highlighting the danger of a simple correlation between archaeological features and residential mobility. As Lindsay discusses, claims about the mobility of the Late Bronze Age inhabitants of the South Caucasus are based in large part on the absence of surface evidence for settlement. Doumani Dupuy points to the consistency of ceramic technologies, despite the seasonal occupation of settlement in her study area. The articles in this section remind

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us that there are no simple correlations between mobility and cultural production, architectural, stylistic, or otherwise.

Timelessness and the Politics of the Past

These chapters examine the intersection of temporality and politics in the production of archaeological knowledge and their impact on the dominant tropes of Eurasia’s historical narratives, including nationalism, state authority, and the creation of cultural communities. Archaeologists have certainly given the messy relationship between archaeology and national subjectivity serious consideration,6 but the particular attention to the role of time in each account in this section illuminates processes whereby fitful histories are transformed into retellings of a past that conform to nation-building and imperial projects of state and subject creation. In the following chapters, the manipulation of time stands out as a common method to smooth histories and soothe politics, deployed by those invested in a particular vision of the past that conforms to their particular ideological agenda. Moreover, in each case where archaeology as a discipline strives to analyze and imagine the past, a consistent connection between temporality, autochthony, and nation-making heavily shapes each iteration of the past, making it knowable and manageable. In her chapter, Maureen Marshall meticulously traces methodological devel­opments in Soviet physical anthropology that reframed the epistemology of Caucasian history. Analysis of human remains from archaeological contexts becomes a pivot-point for articulating temporally-disparate populations into knowable communities. The epistemological shift away from the fixity of racial types revolves around reconstructing historical processes of ethnogenesis. What is striking about the Soviet approach to ‘unruly remains’ from the Caucasus is the shift from fixed racial typologies to teleological stages in the emergence of modern populations; timelessness gives way to a historical logic of ethnogenesis. The analytical focus on ethnos enables archaeological assemblages, bodies, and spaces to be directly linked to the present and its political self-conception. As Marshall describes, this form of physical anthropology undertaken by prominent scholars working on materials from the Caucasus represented a totalizing approach that would come to dominate the Soviet social sciences for decades and would work hand-in-glove with Soviet policy towards communities under its dominion. 6 Kohl & Fawcett 1995; Smith 2004; Khatchadourian 2008.

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Marshall’s attention to the methods implemented in reassembling past and modern populations into a narrative of autochthonous historical development finds a parallel in Magnus Fiskesjö’s account of nationalism, self-identification, and archaeological practice in 20th-century Chinese archaeology. In Fiskesjö’s chapter, the revision of historiography occurs as a dual reconstruction of China’s deep past in the form of pre-state Neolithic archaeological cultures and the recent past in the figure of Johan Gunnar Andersson, a pioneer of early 20th-century Chinese archaeological research. Notably, archaeological data and archaeologists themselves are reassembled in the service of creating historical narratives about past and present that conform to reigning ideologies of the modern Chinese state. Fiskesjö recounts two sources of anxiety driving this process of reassembly: the Neolithic-period materials that challenge Chinese autochthony and the archaeologists who study and interpret these materials outside the narrative boundaries of long-term cultural continuity in China. These threats to the temporal logic of the Chinese nation-state exist only in a particular political movement, which necessitates the transposition of the most problematic ideas and arguments of a perceived anti-Chinese interpretation of ancient socio-political development onto Andersson: the Western origins of Chinese civilization theory. The archaeological materials from Neolithic China require intervention but it is Andersson and his role in Chinese archaeology, standing in for ‘unruly archaeologists’, that necessitate aggressive intercession. This focus on Andersson indicates that the politics of the recent past can be as fractious and significant as the politics of the deep past. Where Fiskesjö uses an individual to center his interrogation of the shifting politics of the past in Chinese archaeology, Kathryn Weber takes a wide-ranging view of archaeological practice as a component of Orientalist traditions in imperial and Soviet Russian engagement with the Caucasus. A serious discussion of how nationalist or expansionist discourses operationalize temporal logics in service of political hegemony would be remiss without due consideration of Orientalism. Weber compares tsarist imperialist and Soviet policies towards the Caucasus through the lens of Orientalism developed by Edward Said in his eponymous 1978 work. A shared idea of the timelessness of a constitutive outsider Other, a hallmark of Western European Orientalism, emerges as a key feature of imperial and Soviet Russian conceptions of its ‘East’ (i.e. territories conquered and incorporated through projects of state expansion) past and present. Both polities applied this temporal logic as they negotiated national identities and state self- conception, but the unruly nature of these identities left space for communities to use their pasts in ways that challenged Orientalist representation and dominant political paradigms.

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Taken together, the papers in Part III interrogate the politics of the past in nationalist and imperialist settings that themselves play out in a global framework with its own determining genealogies of politicized historicity; Maoist China, imperial Tsarist Russia, and the Soviet Union wrestle not only with selfdefinition through an understanding of their pasts but with the legacy of Western discourse on historical development, autochthony, and the constitution of communities and polities. Archaeological materials and attendant discourses weave through broader nationalist and imperialist agendas where temporality functions as a crucial variable in the management of subjects, histories, and politics alike. As the politics of the past involve temporal logics specific to the context in which they operate, detailed investigations of specific cases provide the most compelling glimpses of how epistemology, sovereignty, and historicity are pulled together to create historical narratives out of ‘fitful histories’. Overall, Fitful Histories and Unruly Publics is a volume defined as much by an aspiration for the future of Eurasian archaeology as it is by its capacious understanding of the present moment. It anticipates a future where the tra­ ditional cultural zones of Eurasian archaeology serve as stimuli to delve deeper into the forces binding communities together, the centripetal tendencies ­driving them apart, and the unruly publics that worked between quotidian rhythms of daily life and the seismic cadences of large-scale historical transformations. This is less an effort to undermine existing categories than to give them meaning, to embed them in specific sociologies, and to link them to particular temporal dynamics. As such, we envision a rethinking of Eurasia’s past, one shaped less by the apostolic succession of cultural phases and more by examinations of the unruly negotiations that shape Eurasia’s fitful histories.

References Cited

Hartley, Charles W., G. Bike Yazicioğlu, and Adam T. Smith (editors) (2012). The Archaeology of Power and Politics in Eurasia: Regimes and Revolutions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Khatchadourian, Lori (2008). Making Nations from the Ground Up: Traditions of Classical Archaeology in the South Caucasus. American Journal of Archaeology, 112(2):247–78 Kohl, Philip L. and Clare P. Fawcett (1995). Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Peterson, David L., Laura M. Popova, and Adam T. Smith (editors) (2006). Beyond the Steppe and the Sown: Proceedings of the 2002 University of Chicago Conference on

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Eurasian Archaeology. Colloquia Pontica Monograph Supplement of Ancient West & East. Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden. Popova, Laura M., Charles W. Hartley, and Adam T. Smith (editors) (2007). Social Orders and Social Landscapes. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle. Smith, Adam T. (2004). The End of the Essential Archaeological Subject. Archaeological Dialogues 11(1): 1–20. Spitsyn, Aleksandr A. (1889). Veshchestvennye Pamyatniki Drevnieshikh Obitatelei Vyatskago Kraia. Gub Tip, Vyatka. Wolf, Eric (1982). Europe and the People Without History. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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Part 1 Making Time: Constructed Temporalities and Foregone Futures

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Tin and Oil

Chapter 1

Tin and Oil: Can We Foresee the Future through the Remote Past? Mikheil Abramishvili I know not with what weapons the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth – rocks! ascribed to Albert Einstein

⸪ In this paper I put forward the hypothesis that the current trend of transition from an oil-based monopolized economic system to a non-monopolized (diversified) system of alternative energy resources parallels the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. In order to examine the themes relevant to this hypothesis, I will first outline the conditions in the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age that led to the transition to the Iron Age. I will then present parallels with the modern ‘Oil Age’ and explain why it is relevant to compare the Bronze to Iron Age transition to the challenges that the world faces today. Such an approach in some ways echoes social cyclic theory in representing historical processes as similar to organic cycles of seasonal repetition or organismal growth.1 However, the hypothesis that I am suggesting encompasses larger cycles than the rise and fall of any particular civilization and is based on a comparison of epochal social transformations with global consequences. This form of epochal historical understanding owes a great deal to Christian Jürgenson Thomsen’s refinement of the three-age system of European anti­ quity.2 Although his classification was based simply on the categorization of artifacts made of stone, bronze and iron, and was initially aimed at organizing an exhibition in the National Museum of Denmark in 1825, the system was well-suited to the classification of major socio-cultural and economic 1 Sarkar 1967; Danilevsky 1869; Tainter 1988. 2 Bo Grãslund 1987.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004325470_003

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transformations in the prehistory of almost all of Eurasia. The transformation between each of these periods coincides with the development of major metallurgical stages: first, the introduction of bronze metallurgy and then the shift from bronze to ferrous metallurgy. Although it is unnecessary to focus here on the significance of metallurgy to global history, I want to stress that, for better or worse, civilization as we know it is impossible in the absence of critical technological innovations from the cold hammering of copper to the forging of steel. Without the material developments at the heart of the three-age system we might not have such a cruel world as we have now, with its weapons of iron and steel. But, at the same time, if not for the development of the ancient metallurgy as it took place in the Old World, we would not enjoy the benefits of cars, trains, aircrafts, skyscrapers, let alone the Internet, which enables us to hold the world in the palm of our hand in tiny ‘magic boxes’.

Shaping of the Monopolized Economic Order and the Launch of the Bronze Age

Why Bronze Age societies of the Near East decided to introduce tin bronze in addition to arsenical copper has been one of the enigmas of ancient history.3 I argue that it was not merely the superiority in physical properties of tin bronze over stone (flint, obsidian, etc.) or arsenical copper, or of iron over bronze that conditioned the epoch-making economic and socio-cultural transformations in the ancient world that introduced first the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age economic systems. Rather, a major advantage of tin alloyed bronze was its relatively limited availability, which allowed certain social groups to monopolize the tin supply and benefit from long-distance trade.4 Tin is a relatively rare element in the earth’s crust (approximately 2 ppm), compared to copper (up to 70 ppm) and iron (over 50,000 ppm). J. A. Charles has suggested that the reason for the introduction of tin bronze was to avoid the poisonous features of arsenic.5 However, even today 137 million people in 70 countries are affected by poisoning from arsenic contaminated groundwater in what is widely considered to be one of the worst natural disasters in the history of mankind.6 Hence, it is difficult to imagine that ecological and health awareness was higher in the Bronze Age societies than it is today, or 3 4 5 6

Muhly 1973. Abramishvili 2010:169. Charles 1979:25–32. Blacksmith Institute 2014.

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that fears about the negative health effects of arsenic would have been sufficient to discourage Bronze Age communities from its use. Arsenical copper was never fully replaced by tin bronze and, together with antimonal and tin bronzes, was produced throughout the Late Bronze Age in large quantities.7 Moreover, during the Late Bronze Age, the so-called Karasuk culture of South Siberia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, replaced a tradition of high-quality tin bronze products with a metallurgical repertoire focused on artifacts made of arsenical copper.8 Consequently, the relationship between arsenical copper and tin bronze was not a direct evolutionary transformation governed by the logics of technological superiority. The presence of such impurities in copper as tin, arsenic or antimony was important for the ancient societies not only because they improved the material properties of these metals (e.g. melting at lower temperature, easy casting and solidity compared to pure copper), but also for their resemblance to other metals, such as gold and silver.9 For example, the 13th-century bc grave of a warrior excavated at the Treli Cemetery in Tbilisi contained a belt buckle with the image of a horseman and horse alongside various artifacts, including a blade of an iron knife.10 The body of the belt buckle is made of copper-tin alloy with about 12 per cent tin, which would have given the object a golden color. In addition, the buckle is inlaid with a copper-arsenic-tin alloy, containing up to 25 per cent arsenic and about 5 per cent tin, which would have given a color indistinguishable from silver.11 Unlike the metallurgical traditions of Eurasia, where metals were also utilized in tools, weapons and utensils, metals in South and Central America were primarily valued as adornments that displayed the social status of their owners. In the Pre-Columbian Mexican metallurgical tradition, a copper-tin alloy was used to imitate gold and a copper-arsenic alloy was used to imitate silver. Each was associated with solar and lunar deities, respectively.12 Aesthetic values and associated symbolic meanings of metals obviously were important for the ancient societies of Eurasia as well. In its first phase of application in the pre-ceramic Neolithic, native copper in the Near East was used primarily to

7 8 9 10 11 12

Pike 2002:87–92. Chernykh 2009. Radivojević et al. 2013. Abramischwili and Abramischwili 1995. X-ray fluorescence analyses were carried out by N. Kalandadze at the Georgian National Museum. Hosler 1995:100–115.

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make items that accentuated social relationships, marked social standing, and served as a protection against harm.13 It has been recently suggested that the emergence of tin bronze production from complex copper-tin ores within the 5th millennium bc Vinča culture in the Balkans, some 1500 years before the first appearance of tin bronze alloys in the Near East, might have been stimulated by the desire of smiths to imitate gold, which was already produced and highly valued.14 A polymetallic ore with a high percentage of tin may have been used because of its unique color properties for making a small ring bead that was recently discovered at the Neolithic settlement of Arukhlo (southern Georgia) dating to the 6th millennium bc. According to the results of an initial X-ray examination, the bead contains more than 8 per cent tin. The associated context did not contain post-Neolithic pottery or any other indications of later disturbance. Svend Hansen and Guram Mirtskhulava, the excavators of the site, consider it premature to comment on the results, but they do not exclude the possibility that the bead either was shifted to the location through bioturbation, or evolved here as a natural polymetallic deposit.15 A small clay crucible and a piece of copper plate found during the 1982 campaign at Arukhlo16 suggests that the Neolithic people of the Shulaveri-Shomu culture were acquainted with copper smelting as early as the 6th millennium bc, and therefore may have been capable of producing tin bronze. Hitherto no tin deposits or any complex copper-tin ores have been discovered in the Caucasus, which could have been exploited in antiquity, though we cannot exclude the theoretical existence of such ores. The other possible case of early tin bronze production in the South Caucasus comes from the Chalcolithic pre-Kura-Araxes culture settlement of Delisi in Tbilisi. Here we have the first instance of tin bronze used to produce utilitarian objects, such as awls, arrowheads and needles. This may suggest that the technical superiority of tin bronze over copper was already known in the region, in addition to its aesthetic properties. Apart from bronze artifacts containing about 4 per cent tin, liquid-alloy bronze droplets were also discovered at the site, indicating that the fabrication of the artifacts may have taken place at this settlement.17 The ceramic assemblages and stone tool production techniques share similarities with both the Neolithic Shulaveri-Shomu culture and materials from the Chalcolithic sites in western Georgia; the site has been dated to 13 14 15 16 17

Hansen 2013:137, 159. Radivojević et al. 2013. Hansen and Mirtskhulava 2012. Gogelia and Chelidze 1985:15; Gambacshidze et al. 2010:262, Tab. I-6, 7. Abramischwili and Abramischwili 1995:56.

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the late 5th or early 4th millennia bc, preceding the emergence of the KuraAraxes culture.18 The recently excavated kurgan #1 at Soyuq Bulaq in western Azerbaijan, dated to 3951–3759 cal bc19 and hence contemporaneous with the Delisi settlement, may shed light on the origins of tin in the bronze artifacts of Delisi. As Bertille Lyonnet suggests, most of the ceramic materials discovered in the Soyuq Bulaq kurgans show affiliations with Late Chalcolithic 2–3 pottery from northern Mesopotamia, and can be linked to the “pre-Uruk expansion” towards the north.20 Kurgan #1 at Soyuq Bulaq appears to have belonged to a high status individual. It contained the stone scepter with an equid head, copper dagger and numerous beads made of precious metals and semi-precious stones, including one made of lapis lazuli that may have come from the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan.21 Since tin was also available in Afghanistan, it is possible that the tin in the bronze items found at the settlement of Delisi may also have been of Afghan origin, linked with the trade in lapis lazuli. The commercial advantages of limited resources would have been easily recognizable for the pre-Bronze Age societies of the Near East and especially of the alluvial plains of Lower Mesopotamia, which was not endowed with raw materials for both commodities and luxury items. They had to import flint, obsidian, various metals, timber, chlorite, alabaster and semiprecious stones such as lapis lazuli and carnelian from distant lands22 and it would have been clear to them that the more limited the resource, the easier it was to restrict its distribution and to build a long-distance, monopolized commercial network. For that matter, lapis lazuli was the first prestigious material to give rise to long distance trade extending to several thousand kilometers. Already in the early phase of its trade, lapis lazuli traveled great distances from northwest Afghanistan to Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt.23 It appeared in Mesopotamia during the Late Ubaid period, in connection with the emergence of early complex societies.24 In Egypt, lapis is found in the comparatively rich graves of the Predynastic Naqada II Period in association with other imported goods linking Mesopotamian trade routes to Egypt.25 In addition to the recent 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Abramishvili 1978. Lyonnet et al. 2008; Courcier et al. 2008. Lyonnet et al., 2008:44. Lyonnet et al. 2008. Sagona and Zimansky 2009:149. Casanova 2008:68. Herrmann 1968:21. Payne 1968:68.

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discoveries at Soyuq Bulaq, lapis lazuli in the Caucasus region is also found in sites of the Maikop Culture,26 showing strong Syro-Mesopotamian connections during the period of the so-called Uruk expansion in the second half of the 4th millennium bc.27 The enduring process of gold extraction at the oldest mine of Sakdrisi (Georgia) as early as the second half of the 4th millennium bc may have been one of the main interests of the Urukians in the region.28 Although gold was mined here by the people of the Kura-Araxes Culture, there is no evidence that this gold was intended for the local population. Despite new evidence from Central Asia, Iran and Anatolia on ancient tin mining that has widened the geography of tin deposits exploited during the Bronze Age,29 tin resources were limited to a restricted geographic scope, requiring the material to be transported across great distances. Thus, whether the tin for ancient Near Eastern, Caucasian and Eastern Mediterranean bronzes came from Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asia, Anatolia, or elsewhere, the limited tin supply throughout the region made it possible to monopolize the trade in tin, making it an attractive market resource. However, the question arises: why could arsenic not play the same role as tin? Arsenic was also a scarce resource, and arsenical copper is gold-colored when it contains 4–12 per cent arsenic and silver-colored when it contains 12–18 per cent of the alloy.30 In contrast to polymetalic copper-tin ores, copperarsenic ores appear more often in the peripheries of Mesopotamia, with up to 2 per cent arsenic. The properties of pure copper can be improved with as little as 0.5 to 2 per cent arsenic, giving a 10 to 30 per cent improvement in hardness and tensile strength. However, the precise amount of arsenic remaining in the metal alloy is much harder to gauge due to the manufacturing process.31 Therefore arsenical copper would not be as amenable to commercial purposes as tin. In contrast to arsenic, tin could be added directly to the copper so as to result in a product (tin bronze) with specific, predictable percentage of tin,32 and therefore it could have a fixed price. Tin bronze also had another economic advantage. In contrast to gold, which was the rarest metal used in antiquity (0.005 ppm in the earth’s crust)33 and 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Korenevsky 2004; Apakidze 1999. Sagona and Zimansky 2009: 149, 216; Algaze 1989. Stöllner and Gambashidze 2011. Boroffka and Parzinger 2010: 55–57; Stöllner et al. 2011; Nezafati et al. 2011; Yener et al. 2015. Ravich and Ryndina 1995. Lechman 1996. Pike 2002. Boyle 1979.

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closely associated with elite status,34 tin bronze could have been affordable for a wider circle of consumers and since it also had a yellow color, therefore appearing similar to gold, the owner who could afford a bronze object could demonstrate his or her social rank. This represented the basis for the creation of a broader consumer market built on less than gold, but still limited, and therefore easy-monopolized, tin and copper resources. In mid 3rd millennium bc we see that tin bronze became more and more common; it was a highly valued commodity, because this alloy was used more for prestige goods.35 Texts from a range of sites across the ancient Near East demonstrate the involvement of centralized administrations in procurement, production, and consumption during the 3rd millennium bc, including sources from Ebla, Nippur, Tell Asmar, Kish, Lagash and Nuzi.36 Furthermore, Old Assyrian texts of Kültepe-Kaniş in Central Anatolia attest to Assur’s monopoly in trading tin to Anatolia during the early 2nd millenium bc.37 Frequent mentions of tin, compared to other metals, in these commercial texts and the flow of tin between Assur and Kaniş, estimated as about 80 tons,38 indicate the leading role of tin in the Near Eastern Bronze Age long distance trade model. The prosperity of powerful kingdoms of the 3rd and 2nd millennia bc in the Near East, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean hinged, primarily, on an economic system based on rare and easily monopolized natural resources. Perhaps the best proof of this suggestion is the diversity and great amount of prestigious and other rare items coming from the distant lands found among the cargo of the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean shipwrecks (see discussion below).39

The End of Monopoly and the Catastrophe at the End of the Bronze Age

As is well-known, the majority of the sites in the Near East, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean show evidence of a sudden and violent disruption in around 1200 BC. As Robert Drews describes, there are many theories on the causes of collapse, including earthquakes, volcanic eruption, drought, 34 35 36 37 38 39

Ames 2007. Weisgerber and Cierny 2002. Yakar 2002. Larsen 1967; Dercksen 2005. Lyonnet 2005:194. Pulak 2008.

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migrations and raids, and changes in warfare.40 Drews, who has comprehensively studied all these hypotheses, argues that the invention of new weaponry and its mass production was a key element in the collapse. Most notably, the use of spears by a large number of ‘running skirmishers’ could cut down the chariot armies of the ruling classes, destabilizing hegemonic states and causing abrupt social collapse (Drews 1993).41 Certainly, there were changes in warfare at the end of the Bronze Age and a demand for increased production that placed considerable demands upon limited resources, such as tin and copper. However, I suggest that it was the instability of the long-distance trade upon which tin and copper markets depended, rather than the style of warfare, that prompted the crisis in the market associated with broad scale collapse. Furthermore, the increased number of sites during the Late Bronze Age compared to the Middle Bronze Age implies a growth in population and an increased demand for resources (even without a complete catalog, it is quite apparent that the amount of bronze artifacts produced during the Late Bronze Age exceeded by several times the production capacity of the Middle Bronze Age in the Near East, Eastern Mediterranean, Caucasia and elsewhere). Since greater quantities of tin were required along with copper, and since its acquisition increasingly required moving tin and copper through seafaring routes (into the Eastern Mediterranean), the supply began to be affected by the manner of transportation, among other factors. The longer the distance, the greater the risks, and the risks were even higher when sea travel was a significant part of the journey.42 More shipping meant more shipwrecks. And while looting on land (or piracy, for that matter) did not remove the goods from the market (they merely switched hands), shipwrecks meant the goods were lost to the market, left underwater for us, modern archaeologists, to discover thousands of years later. The tin and copper ingots found in the Uluburun ship­wreck, which taken together could have produced 11,000 kilograms of bronze arti­ facts,43 show us what economic damage a single sunken Late Bronze Age galley could have caused, vividly demonstrating the fragility of the Late Bronze Age long-distance trade model. Increased piracy during the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean may have also created significant market instability. More shipping also could have meant more piracy and privateering. This is apparently how the so-called 40 41 42 43

Drews 1993. Drews 1993. cf. Bass et al. 1967; Pulak 2008. Cemal Pulak 2008:291, 292.

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“Sea Peoples”, the agglomeration of raiders and city-sackers, appeared as key actors on a historical proscenium of the 13th and early 12th centuries bc, disturbing the long-distance trade system and causing the end of the Bronze Age monopolies.44 As a result, those societies whose economy, and hence their power, was primarily based on the long-distance trade of limited resources (first of all tin and copper) administered by centralized palace institutions collapsed. In contrast to tin and copper, which were hard to procure in sufficient quantities without long-distance trade, iron ores were commonly found and widely available close to home45. The knowledge of how to produce iron and forge steel was not amenable to long-term monopoly, unlike the monopoly on limited resources. Once iron (particularly steel) was adopted for use in weaponry and tools, the price of bronze and its composite materials – tin and copper – would have likely dropped, forcing the production of larger amounts of bronze to reach the levels of previous revenues. However, this would have created imbalance between supply and demand that would decrease the price of bronze even more severely. The archaeological record does not reflect widespread use of iron before the 12th century bc. Nevertheless, the availability of steel, a stronger metal than bronze, would have also influenced the bronze (tin and copper) market. The famous letter of the Hittite king Hatusilis III, apparently written to the king of Assyria, apart from indicating a Hittite monopoly on iron, suggests that the ‘good iron’, which presumably meant steel, was already an object of trade between the elites of the 13th century bc. The relevant passage of this letter reads as follows: In regard to the good iron about which you wrote to me – good iron is not available in my armory in the city of Kizzuwatna. I have written that it is a bad time for making iron. They will make good iron, but they have not yet finished it. When they finish it, I will send it to you. For the moment, I have sent you a dagger blade of iron.46 According to this passage, the Hittites were not the producers of ‘good iron’, but intermediaries in the market of this metal, and the people who were producing it (apparently Chalybes of the Greek tradition living in the Pontus

44 45 46

cf. Knapp 1986:98, 99; Drews 1993:91–93. Zaccagnini 1990:497. Tablet KBo I:14, 20–24.

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region of the Black Sea),47 would eventually find other ways to supply the market with their production. Whichever hypothesis one adopts for the collapse of the system at the end of the Bronze Age, I suggest that the reason the system never revived was the vast availability of iron ores, in contrast to tin or even copper, which made monopolization of the iron trade impossible on a long-distance international basis. A limited resource had been replaced with a material that could be found almost everywhere.

The End of the Oil Age – Back to the Stone Age?

I see a striking parallel between the transitions that shaped the end of the Bronze Age and forces directing our modern global economy. We stand on the cusp of a critical change: we are at the end of the Age of Oil. Today oil is a kind of tool with which industrial societies attempt to control and balance international relations. Everything we do is connected to the pipeline. Like tin and copper, oil is a limited resource, one that is monopolized by the powers that control it and one that also depends on transportation across long distances, hence shaping global international relations. Over the past century, instability in the oil market has had a significant impact on global politics and economics, particularly in cases where non-democratic countries used oil as a tool with which to manipulate the market. The 1973 oil embargo initiated by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) in response to US involvement in the Yom Kippur War created both short and long term economic effects for the industrial economies.48 It also prompted a broad initiative in the US and Europe to reduce dependency on oil and, by extension, oil exporting nations.49 As a result of such initiatives, the monopoly on oil is in danger of being destabilized by the introduction of alternative energies that cannot be monopolized, including wind, solar, biofuel, hydrogen, etc. (e.g. the creation of a renewable petroleum from fatty acids of bacteria or the production of electricity through photosynthesis, which brings new meaning to the idea of spinach as a power food). Efforts to replace easily monopolizable oil with renewable energy resources have also been stimulated by the threat of global warming and a great desire in many countries to secure economic independence. In 47 48 49

cf. Drews 1976: 26–29. U.S. Department of State 2013; Sepehri 2002. Bettinger et al. 2010.

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stark contrast to oil, many alternative energy resources are freely available almost everywhere in the world. And so, it follows that, as happened with the collapse of the Bronze Age, a new, non-monopolized economic order is likely to topple the existing global order. Although oil reserves are not at a stage where they have been exhausted, economic, environmental, and political forces are driving the onset of a “postOil Age”, perhaps during the lifespan of most of the world’s current population. To quote former OPEC oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani: “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil”.50 Despite the discovery of shale gas, it is unlikely that it will prolong the current economic order. On the contrary, because of its difference from the traditional oil deposit geography, shale gas will change the current geopolitical balance. What challenges does the world face with the coming of the new economic order? It will decrease the price of oil, radically altering the balance of global powers. Obviously, economic collapse in the first place will arise in those states whose economies are highly dependent on petroleum products. As traditional oil fails as the dominant energy source, the entire international trade network could be upended, and this will not necessarily go smoothly. In order to prolong oil-based economic order, I predict, there will be wars precipitated by those powers that currently control the supply of petroleum products. Military conflict expands the market for petroleum, thus prolonging the monopoly economy. In such a view, the existing order can only be maintained through energy demands created by disorder. These wars may be waged on a global scale that rivals or surpasses the carnage and destruction of the 20th-century warfare. But ultimately, as was the case with the Bronze Age, the old monopolized economic order of the Oil Age will not survive. The hypothesis presented above initially was proposed in 2012 at the 4th Eurasian Archaeology Conference at Cornell University and, until recently, might have appeared rather dubious. However, it has come to my attention that at least one other scholar has subsequently come to similar conclusions regarding the relationship between this period and our own.51 Since the Russian military intervention in Ukraine in 2014, growing international terrorism and aggression from IS/ISIS/Daesh, and the fall of oil prices by more than 70 per cent since June 2014, it is becoming obvious that we already are at the threshold of collapse of the Oil Age monopolized economic order.

50 51

The Economist 2003. Cline 2014.

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A cross-epochal approach makes it possible to not only foresee future challenges through the study of past trends, but to use current events to better understand those of the past. ISIS – a large and sophisticated terrorist group with an army of foreign and local fighters, funded by illicit oil refining,52 can thus be viewed as a parallel to the “Sea Peoples” – a confederacy of naval raiders who harried the coastal towns and cities of the Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age, based on the loss or weakening of elite control over the market of monopolized scarce resources, giving rise to well-organized forces beyond any state (elite) control. Furthermore, both groups are multi-ethnic in composition. Newly emerging power groups face the danger of losing their position and revenue in the transition to a non-monopolized, diversified economic order. At the end of the Bronze Age, as today, the elites controlling the market turned to overproduction in response to the fear of an alternative market taking over their monopoly. In the first case the alternative was iron substituting for bronze, while in modern times it is the shift from oil to renewable energy sources. Today this process can be seen in OPEC failing to restrict oil extraction to balance supply and demand, accelerated by the appearance of new, uncontrolled players in the oil market (e.g. ISIS/Daesh). The dramatic plunge of oil price witnessed nowadays is a direct effect of various countries continuing to supply the world with more oil than necessary.53 Ultimately, overproduction caused economic, social, and political collapse, with ensuing changes in the balance of existing geo-political structure. Hopefully, this painful transition will not bring us to the state of the Greek Dark Ages that lasted for nearly 400 years after the catastrophe at the end of the Bronze Age. And perhaps humanity will come up with a wise solution to live through the transition from an oil-based monopoly economy into a diversified future. This is likely the greatest challenge that humanity faces today. How can we avoid the precedent set by the Bronze Age collapse? We must face these challenges cooperatively. No one country will be able to solve the coming crisis alone; the countries of the world are interconnected. Just as the European Union began to build a common social, economic and political network, so we must work together with a global perspective in moving toward a diversified future. In the words of the great 13th-century Persian poet Saadi, inscribed in the Hall of Nations at the United Nations in New York City:

52 53

Bronstein and Griffin 2014; Aboites 2015. Krauss 2016.

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Human beings are members of a whole, In creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, Other members uneasy will remain. If you’ve no sympathy for human pain, The name of human you cannot retain!

Acknowledgements

First and foremost my profound gratitude goes to Adam Smith, Lori Khatchadourian, and the graduate student organizers of the 4th Eurasian Archaeology Conference, who encouraged me to present my hypotheses as an opening lecture. I would like to express my deep respect and very special thanks to Robert Drews for his expert appraisal and valuable suggestions. I am extremely thankful to Tara Bahrampour, Maya Kiasashvili and Kathryn O. Weber for editing my paper and helping me to shape my ideas in English. If not for all these people my hypotheses would have remained within the circle of my friends.

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