The Role of Pastoral Communities of the Upper Euphrates Region in the Expansion of the Kura-Araxes Culture

As it often happens in the case of the large-scale cultural phenomena, the study and the interpretation of the Kura-Araxes culture, especially when it comes to the dynamics of its geographic expansion, has traditionally been framed within the “core-periphery” interpretative perspective. This perspective, which is so often intuitively employed in the “modern” images of representation of the dynamics of the cultural phenomena, informally assumes the existence of a primary core area of formation of a “culture” which, by the time that it develops, this also expands in geographical terms by means of “impulses” originating from the core and transmitted to the surrounding peripheries as far as its frontiers. In his critique to the core-periphery model, Erich Wolf pointed out that it is “a top-down” model of culture change that privileges developments in the core as the primary causes of changes in a passive periphery . Lightfoot and Martinez have broadened the critique to this approach by stressing that, according to the core-periphery model, cultural innovations only result from the core and are then amplified and transported to the periphery . Consequently, in this core-periphery perspective, the role of the frontiers is limited to that of recipients of core innovations and certainly not to that of active agents in the production, transformation or transmission of the cultural phenomena