The Kura-Araxes Culture In The Shida Kartli Region of Georgia: An Overview

Located in the centre of present-day Georgia, in what is traditionally considered the heart of the Kura-Araxes culture, the Shida Kartli region hosts a relatively high number of excavated Kura-Araxes sites, as well as several sites of the preceding Late Chalcolithic and of the following Early Kurgan cultures (Early Bronze?). It therefore offers a good opportunity to analyze one of the regional variants of the Kura-Araxes culture in its diachronic development. The paper describes the stratigraphy of the main Kura-Araxes sites of the region, discusses available evidence concerning architecture, settlement patterns, burial customs, pottery and other categories of finds, and attempts at drawing up a relative chronology of the region on the basis of stratigraphy, chrono-typology and recent 14C evidence. The origins and the end of the Kura-Araxes culture in Shida Kartli, and the changing patterns in the subsistence and social organization of the local population are discussed in the wider framework of contemporary developments in the neighbouring regions.