Preliminary results of the excavations at Qaraçinar (Azerbaijan) and new data on the “Kura-Araxes - Early Kurgans” transition on the Eastern Piedmont of the Lesser Caucasus

The factors that determined the disappearance of Kura-Araxes communities around the middle of the third millennium are unknown, and the dynamics of socio-cultural transformation during the second half of the third millennium are still unclear throughout the South Caucasus. In this paper, we summarize the state of the art related to the social and cultural developments of the third millennium in western Azerbaijan (namely along the valley of the Kura River), which is still fragmentary and very heterogenous in terms of nature of the archaeological evidence. Next, we present data from new excavations and research conducted at Qaraçinar (Goranboy district) on the eastern piedmont of the Lesser Caucasus within the framework of the ANR-DFG KUR(A)GAN project. Qaraçinar documents an occupation that dates to both the Kura-Araxes and Bedeni periods and that has never previously been documented in the region. In the final section of this paper, the absolute dates of Qaraçinar are compared with those of the ‘Martqopi’ kurgans of the Kura River Valley to reconstruct a novel cultural sequence of western Azerbaijan following the end of the Kura-Araxes period.