{"id":7441,"date":"2020-09-13T16:06:40","date_gmt":"2020-09-13T16:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/?p=7441"},"modified":"2020-09-13T16:07:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-13T16:07:00","slug":"the-earliest-farmers-of-the-caucasus-a-view-from-masis-blur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/?p=7441","title":{"rendered":"The Earliest Farmers of the Caucasus: A View from Masis Blur"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky, Postdoctoral Scholar, CIoA, UCLA<br>Alan Farahani, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UNLV<br><strong>September 16, 2020,&nbsp;1:00pm &#8211; 2:00pm PST<\/strong><br>Virtual Pizza Talk Series &#8211; UCLA<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This talk is a summary of research conducted at the archaeological site of Masis Blur, an early farming\n community located in the Ararat plain of Armenia and occupied \ncontinuously for nearly a millennium from ca. 6200 cal. BC \u2013 5200 cal. \nBC. While much is known about how communities in west Asia adopted a \nfarming way of life, much less is known about the Caucasus. The Masis \nBlur Archaeological Project explores the rhythms of everyday life at the\n Neolithic village in this understudied region using high resolution \ntechniques to recover, record, and analyse the material remains of \nday-to-day activities. The talk highlights recent fieldwork and \npreliminary results from Masis Blur with specific focus on enhanced \nphotographic techniques (photogrammetry), archaeological plant remains ,\n animal husbandry, obsidian procurement, and a few key discoveries such \nas calcified basket remains, evidence of thatched roofs, and pigment \nprocessing workshops&nbsp; which, to date, are singular for the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky is a  Postdoctoral Scholar at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology where she is  directing the Research Program for Armenian Archaeology and  Ethnography. She earned her PhD in Archaeology from UCLA in 2018 and she  has been directing the Masis Blur Archaeological Research Project since  2012. As an anthropological archaeologist she uses geochemical  characterization of materials to study past human behavior. In  particular, she looks at how early farming communities of the Southern  Caucasus made use of the available natural resources and how these  behaviors influenced the spread of technological innovation and social  change. <\/em><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Alan Farahani is an Assistant Professor of  Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.&nbsp; He is an  anthropological archaeologist whose research focuses on how ancient  agriculture was embedded in and influenced the social, political, and  cultural practices of people in the past. His methodological expertise  is paleoethnobotany, or the analysis of archaeological plant remains, as  well as in the use of contemporary computational tools such as Python  and R to effectively manage archaeological data. He has conducted  fieldwork throughout the world, and has been working on the Masis Blur  project since 2018.<\/em><br><br><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Register for this UCLA Cotsen Virtual Pizza Talk <a href=\"https:\/\/forms.gle\/F3kKFBh2aJzAyM456\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\">here<\/a>! You will receive instructions on viewing the talk after registering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky, Postdoctoral Scholar, CIoA, UCLAAlan Farahani, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UNLVSeptember 16, 2020,&nbsp;1:00pm &#8211;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-events"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7441"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7444,"href":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7441\/revisions\/7444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arisc.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}