The Entanglement of Landscape: Fire, Climate, and Agro-Pastoralism in the Bronze and Iron Age South Caucasus

International audience ; This paper investigates how the different social and political structures in Bronze and Iron Age Armenia shaped the surrounding steppe landscape through their agro-pastoral practices. We utilized a series of sediment cores from an altitudinal transect from around Mount Aragats, Armenia in conjunction with multiple biological and geochemical proxies (pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs, XRF, brGDGTs) and the archaeological record to untangle drivers of landscape change. This novel approach integrates multiple lines of evidence in order to understand the complexity of the entanglements of climate, fire, agro-pastoralism, and vegetation in this mountain steppe landscape.In this paper we focus on the pollen and macro-charcoal results from two sediment cores. One higher in the foothills, published in Cromartie et al. (2020), and a new record located in the valley. We find the markers of human activity corresponds with Early Bronze Age Kura-Araxes expansion of cereal agriculture into this highland region. This is followed by a decline in these markers in the Middle Bronze Age when there is a shift away from permanent settlements and increases in mobile pastoralism. Human indicators of agro-pastoralism land-usage return as communities return to practice settled agriculture from the Late Bronze Age through the Iron Age. Human landscape usage is primarily isolated to the core site in the valley through most of the record, but this changes during the Iron Age when shifts in political structure may have driven communities to utilize wetlands higher in altitude. Macro-charcoal analysis across all cores records a similar fire history which appears to be driven by climate until the last 2000 years but shifts in vegetation in the previous periods suggests humans contributed to declines in the natural fire regime. Overall, our records show that even within a small geographical area, human communities unevenly utilized the landscape and the differing social-political contexts influenced these changes. We ...