Preface

Our investigations in the Lesser Caucasus arose from a visit to the site made by Tania King in 1998 while on a six month academic visit to the Institute of Geology, National Academy of Sciences. The Republic of Armenia. At that time there was increasing interest in discoveries being made at the site of Dmanisi, Georgia, which is located approximately 30 km from the border of Armenia. Armenian scientists were keen to collaborate on survey projects in the region with scientists from overseas. One of the sites that Tania was shown during that first visit was the cave at Azokh. She noted that a large amount of sediment had been excavated from the front of the chamber, but she also saw that sediments still remained in situ at the rear of the cave, and hence, there was a potential for further excavation and discoveries. On returning to the UK, a collaboration was formed with Yolanda Fernández-Jalvo (who was then an EU Post-doctoral Research Fellow at The Natural History Museum), Peter Andrews (then head of the Human Origins Program of The Natural History Museum – NHM), and Levon Yepiskoposyan (who was a visiting researcher at University College London). We first carried out a survey of regions in northern, western and southern Armenia in collaboration with Yuri Sayadyan and other members of the Institute of Geology, the Armenian National Academy of Sciences, in 1999. This was followed in the same year by a short visit to Azokh Cave and nearby Tughlar Cave in Nagorno-Karabakh. After a second survey in 2001 (King et al. 2003; Fernández-Jalvo et al. 2004), we agreed to undertake excavations at Azokh Cave to investigate archaeological, geological and paleontological context of this site. The Azokh sites are located in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory at the southeastern end of the Lesser Caucasus range. This volume describes the results from the eight excavations from 2002 to 2009 and the scientific research conducted on the excavated material. This work is still ongoing. At the time when we started this project, there were no specialists in Paleolithic Archaeology, Anthropology, Geology or Palaeontology at the State University of Arstakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), and few in The Republic of Armenia, and so we brought together a group of specialists that would continue the work at the site of Azokh and other localities, with the long term intention of setting up relevant departments in the local university, and ultimately increasing science capacity in Nagorno-Karabakh. We placed particular emphasis on the training of local students. In this respect, two local students are receiving postgraduate training in Archaeology and Palaeontology at European institutions (IPHES/University of Tarragona – under the direction of Isabel Caceres and Ethel Allué) supported by the Erasmus Mundus (Master’s degrees in Quaternary and Prehistory) and Wenner-Gren (Wadsworth International Fellowship for Ph.D. research) Foundations. Additional students from both local and overseas participate in the excavations, we have a number of field assistants from Azokh village who joined the excavation team each year. Several have received training in excavation techniques and also in the field laboratory, and some of the assistants are now well qualified in excavation techniques and are included in the excavation team.