The Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS) is a collaborative American-Armenian research initiative that has been conducting archaeological investigations in the environs of Mt. Aragats, in central Armenia, since 1998. As a co-director of this project, my research to date has centered on the mid-first millennium BC settlement at Tsaghkahovit. Our excavations have explored everyday material and spatial practices in this semi-subterranean mountain town of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550-330 BC). These intensive, single-site excavations are nested within a broader program of regional surveys and landscape analyses that seek to understand the emergence and re-formulation of social and political institutions in the Aragats region from pre-history to the present.
Investigators:
- Lori Khatchadourian, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University
- Adam T. Smith, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University
- Dr. Ruben Badalyan, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Yerevan