 My main priority is just to hear about the fall of the U.S., and so this was, is an opportunity for all of us in the community to hear about the work that Amy is doing. Coming to us from Cornell University, which is my own university in Colorado, so I deeply approve. We're going to speak with the principal and the articles with Christine Hastorn to lay out a math group. And, you know, between the Highlands and the Scottish Highlands, the other Highlands, as we usually talk about around the future, in the South America, the 2016 field season of the project, are the gods. And the state of California, oh no, are media. The state of paleo-invertebral studies of Rosemary and H.R. media, I had to do this wrong. Oh. Oh, this is even more. Well, I'm glad I had some surprises for everyone. It's a very small country, and so I know that not everybody necessarily know its locations. It is a landlocked country, and the word highstan, which is Armenian for the country, Armenia actually means highlands, so stan, fi, from the Persian word, stan lands. So it is a mountainous region, but it is very, very, and I would go into a little bit sort of how geographically and geologically and climate-wise you have a lot of different sort of variations in this very, very small region. Armenia has had a very interesting past. It was first noted as a written and the Byzantine inscription by Dara during the coming of the Persian Empire. So it's a very old empire. It's also the first Christian empire, or, I'm sorry, Christian state, so it very much holds to that tradition. So the project I worked with is a project that's been working in Armenia, specifically the Sakohobi Plain, for the last 18 years. It was started by Rubin Balian and Adam T. Smith, who was then at the University of Chicago, but is now at Cornell, and one of Adam's students. And they have continued in this area for a long period of time and have explored multiple sites in the region. I chose some pictures of some of our more famous sites. We have a site of Gehro, which is an early bronze to late bronze site. It's a photo site and also a Sakohobi, which has both late bronze and early iron age deposits. So our project is focused mainly on the bronze age and the iron age in Armenia, but there are other sorts of archaeological periodization as well. We do have geolistic sites and medieval sites, but there are some holes in the chronology as well. We're missing some data, which I will show a little bit later. One of the unique things about our project is that it is truly a collaborative project. We've worked with the Armenian Ethnographic and Institute of Archaeology, and we have a co-director, Rubin Balian, who is from that organization, and then have a partnership with the universities in the United States. Cornell is a part of it, and a lot of Adam's students have gone on to become co-directors themselves. So Ian Lindsey, who's an Adam's student for UCSB, is now a co-director at Purdue, and Lori Jephthoryan is a co-director at Cornell, and a lot of Adam's other students have continued to participate in the project throughout their career, so it's a really great community environment. So where is the project itself located in Armenia? So we sit at the base of Mount Argats. Argats is the tallest peak in Armenia. It's at 4,010 meters, I believe. It's mainly a volcanic peak, so there is a dormant volcano. It hasn't erupted in quite some time, which is good for us to excavate. Our project sort of focuses on both the highland and the lowland valleys, especially on the Sakohobi Plain. So you can't really see this picture so well, but we have Mount Argats here, and we are excavating sites, multiple sites around the area. So another thing about our project is that we're not at one specific site. We are actually excavating multiple sites, and this has given us a really great way to sort of understand the landscape and how these hilltop fortresses and how they interact with each other on a larger scale and to understand the rise and maintenance and falls of each of these early iron age societies and how they've interacted and how they're the same landscape. And in many cases, they are actually having the same settlements. Even with sort of holes in our chronology, we have intrusions from late bronze into iron age settlements, and we have iron age settlements that are built on the same hilltops as the bronze age settlements. So we are seeing this sort of reuse of this similar landscape, even though they were under very different political structures. So here's sort of a chronology of the Sokohobi Plain. And as you can see, I've highlighted in red the periods that are present on the plain. So we have early bronze, late bronze, and late iron, and this is the main periods of our project. It deals with, and as you can see, there are gaps in this. And the iron age and the iron one and two period, we have gaps during the awarding period where people seem to be going down further into the lowlands and are moving away from the mountain areas. And then we have the middle bronze age, which most likely people didn't have at the plain. The middle bronze age was a more ephemeral period and finding settlements is more difficult. So I'm going to talk about our 2016 field season and some of the activities that we've done. It was a very busy season, and so we were working in multiple sort of areas. So we did a pedestrian survey. We also conducted, did some XRF analysis of our obsidian that we found at our site, looking to do some obsidian sourcing. We have a program with drone, some of the grand tree and photography. And of course, we also did some excavation. So I'm going to talk first about our survey. We call it class. I don't know if any of you guys have heard the Russian drink class, but it's sort of a plan that actually stands for Colette Valley Archaeological Survey. But we like the sort of kind of play that we have there. So this is our second year of survey in this area. We've had another survey in the Sokhovy Plain, which was done many years ago, but this is a new program of survey and we have some new goals to be addressed. The main goals were to understand the dynamics of warfare and the impacts of violence and the dynamics of these felt-out fortresses on the social-political structures during the bombs and iron ages. So on our surveys, we're looking for fortress sites and settlements. We're looking for burial clusters, especially high concentrations of burial clusters, and also looking to look for possible sites for future excavation. So some of the challenges that some of you are beginning to know some of these challenges with working in this area are, one, we're in the mountains. So this means that when we are conducting this survey, we're climbing over hills. We're climbing into valleys. And there is sort of a, people might get hurt, which we did have a couple injuries, unfortunately this season, but iron was okay, but the rock won. And we also have very poor visibility. At artifact scatters in the area are, basically, we cannot find artifact scatters unless it's some sort of soil erosion or if there's a trench or sort of anthropogenic hole that's been dug. So we really have to base most of our findings on architecture. Luckily, the area is rich with the salt and tooth, and this is the building materials that have been used since the early Bronze Age and continue to be in use today. So pretty much every period that we do find has used stone as its building material. But it's still in rock-rich landscape. It makes it difficult to necessarily differentiate what is architecture and what is necessarily geological. Another issue that we have is that Armenia was part of the former Soviet Union, which means that it was also part of collectivized farming. And during the Soviet period, the Soviets took large-scale bulldozers and completely moved rocks and dirt from the valleys and put them into these large field clearance walls so that they could plant different crops. So this means that a lot of what we think are settlements, which would have been lower, and the valleys have been erased by a large-scale Soviet farming program. I think that the land modification of the city is interesting in itself and makes it very difficult to actually find earlier sites that are located in these areas. Now, there are some things like the extractor can only go up in certain sort of gradients. So things like kernons are somewhat intact if they're large enough where they just kind of run around them. There are other sites because they are on hillside and are very rocky. And also, burial clusters seem to survive because they are made with a lot of rocks and it just the pain of moving them would have been too much. So there are certain features that are easier to determine, while some are a little more difficult. So this is just sort of our survey area. The blues highlighted are the Sokkovovy Plain survey and the red is our new survey area which follows the Kozak River, which is right here. So some of our site results that we found this year is we found, and this is something we can find in the last year's data as well, we found possibly 11 new fortress sites which we're investigating. One of them is this possible medieval period site that happens two meter long called Sapa Bear. This is a drone photograph from that site and you can see there is this wall here it's most likely this wall here. These sort of very large scale sites are kind of common in the region and I'll show you some pictures of the ones that were excavated so you can understand the real scale of it. Another thing we did was ground truthing. We were looking for pergone burials and this is one of these sort of instances where these pergones were left intact as the barley fields around them so the Soviets were able to clear this field but they left the pergones there so we were able to go to these sites and verify that these do indeed look like pergones but of course we don't know for sure until we actually do some excavation. Another interesting sort of the I find interesting because I'm interested in sort of agricultural practices around these what may be livestock corals they're at least sort of horseshoe-like structures that are made out of stone. We don't know what period these would date to but we do have modern examples from Yazdi farmers who still practice agro-pastoralism up higher in the mountains and so this is a contemporary usage where they put these animals in these corals so we're starting to look at maybe ethnographically how we can link these and maybe date them to earlier periods and see if there is a long-term usage of these types of agriculture structures on the plain. Some of our survey material I think that we don't find a lot we did find some things that I think were kind of cool we found those hammocks I am not somebody who works in the Paleolithic norolithic, maybe one of you guys kind of know what period this comes from but our one expert on the project was pointing towards maybe the Paleolithic and the Middle Paleolithic but I'm not entirely sure we also found this stela which we have named Stela Dian I have given credit to Alan Green for that and he was going into the museum the National Museum they have quite a few of these in the museum so those are just some of our larger crimes that we found we also did quite a bit of excavation this year our main goals with excavation were to continue our programs at Gepa Roads and to do some test excavations on one of our new sites which is Alperoni Baird just to kind of show you how far in range our sites are Gepa Roads is up here and so we had two excavations at Gepa Roads and Alperoni Baird is up here they are about 30 minutes away by car that's where we did also two excavations and we also had a test excavation in the loose side view so I'm going to talk a little bit about Gepa Roads and what our plans were and what our findings were for this season so Gepa Roads is a very large late bronze age and early bronze age fortress on top of this hilltop so this is a kind of a view from Gepa Roads of the Sakagobi plain and most of our excavations our large scale of excavations in the past have been focused on the top of the hilltop so here we have found shrines that are really actually bronze age and we have found some evidence of settlements in the early bronze age and we are trying to understand how this large hilltop relates to the fortress structure within this larger valley even the Russians have put an antenna on top of the hill so that visibility is very good we have done lots of seasons of field work at the top of the mountain so we're now trying to go down a little bit and see if there are stuff lower in elevation and indeed we did find some so this is further down the hill it's still on the hill but we found an early bronze curroxah I won't say settlement it's most likely more of a ritual space we're still trying to determine if there's any material or in safety who's at Cornell with me it was the excavator of this and so she is in the process of interpreting the data and what she found and what we found is these large semi-circle rock structures and a tube that was intact along with a tube that had been looted at some point so there's this mixture between funerary practices and sort of a massive architecture so we're trying to understand how this works into a larger picture my thing, one of the things that I'm doing here is I took soil samples from the surfaces of this this ritual space I'll say from trying to geographically distribute them looking for possible areas or that there were more grays sorry, excuse me so far I'm doing this here in Christine's lab so some of the things I found is that it does seem like we do have some areas of concentrated burning we have a curve which is expected that we're of course going to our materials but I've also found a more charcoal near one of our graves and so I'm trying to determine and I will do this with Gaddafi to see if there may have been some sort of ritual influence ritual burning that happened near the funerary site our taxa or finding is very similar to taxa that we found on different parts of the site before we find a lot of graves and a media taxa which I hope to kind of plug into the greater environmental picture another sort of excavation we did was of our pergones so you can see is sort of jeep for size there's very large pergone burials that we have they're not as large as some that are in Eastern Europe but they still are fairly big in the front of the area and you can see Garen, one of my colleagues this is actually from last year in the central chamber of one of these large pergones usually they do include human remains but the preservations are in this area this particular area a gecko is quite poor and so we don't have a lot of remains that we're able to excavate but we do have a lot of ceramics we do have bronze this year we found a what we think is some sort of ceremonial drinking vessel it's a large vessel that has four tiny individual vessels that are sort of perched on top and I've taken vitality washes on that and I'm hoping to sort of get some insight and I also have the soil to analyze or not the soil but the flotation from the soil to analyze to see if maybe we can get some ideas of what this vessel was used for so another excavation we did which was in this very early stages is off of Ronnie Baird so this is the large a large portrait site that's multi-period and it ranges the material that we found on the we did survey on this site it reaches from the early bronze into the medieval period and you can't really see it very well but these are my test trenches and they're like one by one or two by twos on the hill so that gives you kind of an idea of how massive this structure is so our goals with this is to try to understand where people were settled on this and how this works into the larger narrative built out fortresses it's located by the Kaza River which is the main river running through the area and to this day people very much use it to have their livestock go through so it's a very active area so we think that it can give us some really great insight but we're doing some test excavations to try to figure out exactly what this fortress is where people lived and we're still trying to ask those questions this season maybe it was a little to clear it up as much as we wanted to so our first test trenches last year at the top of the fortress and what we found was one perhaps a room wall that was mostly associated with early bronze age material however there are some late bronze age material this is on the western part of the the top of the hill so we're really looking to see is this a summit that on the top or are they using the terror structures which and our other excavations they were very much using the terracing of the hillside so this year we looked at the western and eastern terraces so I excavated the western terraces walls and Laura Kachinorin and Adam T. Smith excavated the eastern trench walls and what we found is mainly the western trench that I worked working on was filled with early bronze material we tried to excavate the terraces but as you can see with the livestock going through and with the water coming down into the Kazakh these terraces have been sort of eroded over time so a lot of material has been sort of washed down the hillside and actually not in context anymore so we believe that there was definitely an early bronze present on the western side of this fortress but we're not sure where it is or even if we're going to be able to find it due to this erosion over time but we did find one sort of wall and found some reinforcing of the terrace at different levels so on the upper trenches of the eastern walls we found more evidence of walls and these point to early and I'm sorry late iron age and some late bronze age mainly iron age materials so we think that there's sort of an interesting dynamic going on where maybe iron age settlements were on the eastern side and on the top where for some reason the western side were on the late bronze but again we're still trying to understand the dynamics and there's such a large fortress structure we could just be not dating our trenches in the right places so next year we're going to be doing some GPR and hopefully going to be able to try to understand where these settlements actually are we also excavated some burials that are adjacent to the fortresses burials one of them was a salvage operation there's a sand mining going on in the area and there was a burial that was poking out of the side of the sand mine so we excavated that some late bronze age burial and then we found we had two burials one with only a few human remains in it and then one with a articulated skeleton so this was done by a doctor she's an osteologist and she is working on sort of going through the bones and seeing aging, sexing and trying to make sense of these burials but one of the things that's very interesting about these burials is they have a large stone sort of these large chrome legs and large castones which means that it's very difficult to get into them and so we have a lot of our workers here with like 16 year old boys move these very very large stones but everybody was okay we got them out and we were able to sort of look at these burials so future excavations and survey goals are to, we want to conduct GPR at the site to see if we can find where the settlements are out of Barony Bay and we want to determine if we should go forward with large scale excavations or if maybe there's another suitable site and we want to continue excavating the burials at Ganger wrote the settlement that we started we're going to continue excavating the late Bronze Age pergones, we've done six in total, we really wanted to get done every year, we wanted to sort of finish them I think there's only one or two left and then we want to continue with our early Bronze settlement that we found this year to understand the dynamics with survey we're going to continue with our industrial survey and we're going to start excavating at maybe Kuchak or another Barony Bay site and we want to continue our program of aerial imagery so one of the things I also wanted to talk about which is part of my research is our paleo-environmental goals for the project going forward, so 2016 we we wanted NSF grants and this included doing some additional paleo-climacology and environmental reconstruction so going forward I hope to sort of participate more in this process and we can gather some environmental data which has not really been collected for the project, so far beyond paleo-economic data so we have funding for analysis of the core that's already been taken and also taking a new core in the region and we're partnering with CNRS in France to do this work and they have done a large scale environmental work in the region and they're currently working on that so we're hoping to contribute to a larger body of work so I wanted to go into a little bit of the challenges of doing paleo-environmental reconstruction in this area so these are maps of the Caucasus in general so because of its location in between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and the southern Caucasus are south of the greater Caucasus mountains there's a lot of different sort of fluctuation in environments and a lot of different vegetations and geography so we have everything from alpine regions to lowlands we have desert, arid regions and the odds are by the Yellow Line and then we have sort of these forested areas as well so this is sort of orally taken from the Caucasus environmental outlook that just shows the different sort of climate regions in the area and the different categorizations of some of the vegetation so I wanted to show sort of this picture of this variability so this picture is taken from the middle plain which is right here which is a very flat desert area where this is our clean which is more of a grassland environment and then we have from higher mountains of Georgia and you can see of course my picture is from Armenia which is also a very mountainous region so there's a lot of challenges in understanding these microclimates one of the main challenges is that one center for from the region is not going to really tell us the complete environmental picture so there have been some archaeologists that have made some claims about some more generalizations about cultures based on climate information and while their work may actually be right we need to find out some more data in order to do that I just wanted to use an example of these sort of hypotheses so Anthony Segona who's at the university has done a lot of environmental work at the site of Chilretti they've done sediment core analysis pollen analysis, vitality analysis and he has this hypothesis along with one of his students Simon Connors who does the environmental work that the spread of the hydroxyl culture was due to the climate conditions being at an optimum so that there was a warming in this area and this caused them to spread all over the Caucasus well if you look compared to my picture again the spread of this culture you can see that the variation in climate and geology and where the people live was actually quite different and while Tony may absolutely be right we can't really make this assumption for every region for example looking at ethnobotanical data we see that at Gagaro which is a site that I work on that we actually have a more dominance of barley Roman Higassian who is the Paleoethnobotanist that's been working at this site, introduces to it being at higher altitude because barley gets more robust and can handle cooler climates whereas other hydroxy sites do not have the same dominance of barley so even just looking at these assemblages we see that there are definitely changes people are making decisions based on the environment that they're living in which means that more studies have to happen throughout the greater region so the French had this new project where they partnered with all the archaeological institutes in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia which make up the southern Caucasus to do a both in local and regional analysis of the paleo environment so they are doing sediment core analysis in Armenia and Georgia and Spoon hopefully in Azerbaijan they're doing geomorphology and the Mill Plain Azerbaijan looking at the rise and fall of the Caspian Sea which has fluctuated quite a bit throughout the entire Holocene and also how this impacts the Kora and the Oroxies River which are very important archaeologically because a lot of links to these rivers have been discussed when we discussed the Oroxies expansion and they're also doing local studies so they're doing paleoenology at the site, sediment analysis at the site and also paleoethnobody to get an idea of how each of these factors contribute to a larger picture so Project Argox is part of this larger picture and we have done we have worked in cooperation with them to do charcoal analysis at the site of Gecorot and we also are going to be contributing and working with them hopefully I will be working with them to do some paleoenology on the sediment core so that we are extracting so that we can add one more sort of frame into this this larger picture here's just one of the reports I'm not really going to go into it but this is one of the pollen reports that has been produced and has also the pollen records that from all the parts of the region but yeah I won't go too adept into it. One of the other things that I forgot in there that people do make this assumption that the caucuses actually do not have a lot of paleoethnobotanical information, this is actually incorrect we have had people working do paleoethnobotanical work and the Russians did some work as well but there's a lot of work that still needs to be done and it's very much focused in particular time regions and particular areas so Roman Kovacian who is at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography is the Armenian paleoethnobotanist and he has done quite a bit of work but most of this work is focused on paleolithic, the Neolithic and the early Bronze Age which is due just to the projects that he works on and then there have been some reports on the Iron Age these were mainly done in the 1940s and the 1950s in Armenia done and published in Russian and through taking Russian techniques which at the time were very good but we have improved a little bit since then I hope and then there is a lack of data in the Late Bronze Age so this sort of shows at the early Bronze across the Sunic offices the paleoethnobotanical data that we have recorded as you can see there is a distribution but we're missing a lot of data from Azerbaijan and we have it only in sort of areas of Russia part of Georgia part of this correlates to where the Koroastrian sites are but there's still a lot of work so one thing that we're hoping to sort of contribute to as a project is that we have we're focused on the Late Bronze and the Iron Age we also have some medieval period sites so how can we add to this greater data size and expand not only the early Bronze information but also the Late Bronze and the Iron Age as well so we are going to continue to look at the paleoethnobotanical data we see like I said before sort of the dominance of our early weeks in the area the main focus of the research has been on agriculture processing which we see a lot of sort of mixed grains with both wheat and barley growing and we I think that we have a lot of barley also because since it is a mountainous region we are doing a lot of, there's a lot of pastoral activity so we're most likely using this for fodder so those kind of questions are still needed to be addressed but we also have a lot of wheat taxa that's been identified but it's never been contextualized or interpreted so this is a great opportunity to sort of go back through a lot of the data that we have and understand not only the agriculture practices but also understand some of the environmental data as well so some of the studies that we hope to do next year is to continue our projects with paleoethnobotany add an anthropological lens to what's already been published we have had a limited pollen phytolith analysis on the site so I hope to go forward and do some more of that on a site-specific level we have quite a few instances where we have done pollen washes but they have not actually been processed and we have had actual interpretation but we need a little bit more of it done and then of course the core is from shinkani which is the core that has already been extracted and the new settlement core so hopefully this will give us a lot more insight into the overall climate not only in our house but contribute to this later larger body of research in the region and the caucus this is a great area to do sort of research and look at it from a more global perspective than what contemporary climate studies due to its range and from mountains to deserts it really gives some insight into how humans interacted during these sort of extreme environments so thank you yeah absolutely yeah thank you for your talk I'm just curious what are the two or three paradigms that people are using right now when they talk about agriculture and the lower caucus in the lower caucus when the bronze iron yeah the bronze iron age I'm familiar with the furtive press right so how does it fit in or not fit in so we know that the caucus is normally not the origin of the agriculture and that somehow that there was spread into the caucuses but there's still a little debate on when that happened for the bronze and iron age I'm trying to wrap my head around it myself but there seems to be a lot of wheat and barley being grown and in different mountainous regions of course used for fodder but I can't really articulate what the paradigms are at this point but there really isn't probably a bunch of studies that have been done especially in Armenia are still sort of in implementation of taxa and haven't been really contextualized in an iron cultural setting yet so there's a few sites that are a little bit more interested in agriculture practices but it's still sort of more about this is just what we found this is what people might have been meaning but not really in the classical period I'm not talking about it as a brent in the visiting period it's like a bread basket for other parts of the empires this is all for local consumption well definitely wine production has been in Armenia since one of the earliest documented areas so there was definitely in I think even sort of a talks about I don't know wine production I'm sorry but yeah I don't really know that much about that sorry I had a great question about it yes so I was intrigued because you very carefully the sense I get is that history has been a very descriptive research and we should avoid this but sort of culture historical well and then you have this lovely mention that what needs to happen is a more anthropological approach so one of the more anthropological sort of lenses that you're hoping to bring to this so one of the larger questions as a project is understanding the political complexity in the region and we see different sort of we see in the late Bronze Age that people are under they're facing warfare they're under violence and how are they reacting to this environment where there's a larger political central apparatus whereas in the Iron Age you have sort of a more removed community that as Florian Kasturian said is hiding itself away from the rule of the war to an empire this is during the Kevinin period where they're acting as a same trap but they're actually kind of removed from the centralized authority so they are not under the same sort of stress of everyday violence and warfare that we see in the late Bronze Age so working into the environmental issues and the agriculture issues is how are people under these having the same landscape and having the same settlements how are they sort of dealing with these overall political structures how did this influence their agriculture decision making did the landscape dictate some sort of agriculture decision making or did the social structures how did that influence it and also was any kind of climate change did that have any sort of impact on this whatsoever we know that the Iron Age that people go down into underground and they have their houses being in the underground so this could be attributed to colder climate but we don't know it could also be for multiple other reasons so how did these greater things work into this larger era to the warfare go ahead we were talking about the Eastern and Western occupation that was helpful, I was intrigued and the thing you kind of brought up was Iron Age was some of those ages that shift so were there major transformations in tactics at that point was it a change in mounted warfare that you know the types of mounts that were using or was it a change in weaponry was there a change between those two periods that was significant enough because there was a hiatus within your war team which of course had a great level of sort of violence which we do not have a war team that is out there we're kind of missing that transition but we see in the late Bronze Age there's definitely a lot of spheres there's a lot more hilltop fortresses in the late Bronze Age and just a more clear cut that they were under some sort of stress whereas in the Iron Age they're moving a little bit further down they're reoccupying the same spheres but they actually are much further down they're not going up to the top of the fortress we don't see the same sort of weaponry being used we see replications of ceramics coming from the center of the Persian Empire so we see replications of things from the Persepolis and so we see a dynamic where they're under imperial rule but yet they're also acting more autonomous and seem to be for a high way I actually have this kind of theory that maybe relearning their more traditional pastoral ways were being under a war too they were doing a lot more large scale agricultural wars and in the coming period they're coming back and going back to their land and starting to pass through their animals again and we do seem to have evidence during the the Iron Age so the first occupation, the first component is more of a tactical situation but the second component is the regional strategies how many do have sight aggression but we don't really understand the Iron Age period completely because we only really have one and I was just saying it's the Iron III period not the War II period that's been fairly well researched but we don't understand because we only have really one occupation in this area of the Iron Age and so that we found some Iron Age deposits here we'll hopefully start to answer those bigger questions on what were they really doing were they hiding away why were they reoccupying these fortress sites where we know that they bronzaged most likely these were used for tactical because the thing that they brought up I kept the same is that we see these kinds of redactors in strictly military tactical terms but there's also the question of surveillance that might be in effect as you're saying when they're doing this more pastoral landscape thing and you don't have to be out of reach of a steer to take advantage of the kind of sort of landscape and one of the things that's sort of interesting about South Aronibair is that it is fairly high you can see a lot in the landscape but it also kind of is covered with a bowl that goes into the cousin so we haven't found any sort of evidence but it might be a good place to kind of keep your animals and keep your crops that are out of sight but still be able to Is anyone doing these sort of vision analysis things of them? Sure we haven't done it at our area but there haven't to be released at all we have done it on the war team period on the war team fortresses because the war team also used to build top fortresses and found in definitely maybe possibilities of fire beacons It would be very interesting to see if you do have these two different periods in the same general location the shift when you go downhill what is the landscape Yeah Let's start I was wondering you noticed some of the sites are very shallow stratigraphy it seems like all the modern agriculture is happening elsewhere during the Soviet period they had a lot of investment down below where they did the tractor and the dishing and so maybe these higher sites Right well the sites that I showed of Aronibair actually that's because it was at the very, very top so I think over the the years it's sort of been washed away and so we hit bedrock pretty quickly other sites like Igaro, Sokobi which I didn't really talk about on our hilltop so we've had like much lower stratigraphy but when it comes to the settlement period where the Soviets actually did there's land exploration projects we haven't actually explored anything down there because it's so vast they are doing modern crops, they grow barley to stay there we had when we were doing survey we were mapping sort of the Soviet clearance walls and any sort of features and we're trying to do some satellite we have some satellite imagery that we did prior to some of these land transformations and we don't understand that but we really don't understand the valley at all because we just haven't at this point we know if we dig we'll probably find material but finding the settlement context is just like she mentioned early one of your photos you were walking in the fog field yeah yeah so we are walking in the fields because the Kergons do stick out the landscape because they were never tracked over and also the other burial ground so we do walk the landscape but unfortunately we don't usually find anything in the fields in fact this year so last year we did a lot of survey in the sort of lower valleys and we did not have a lot of results so this year we've gone higher up and we need to be deeper in the valley so not going to use it so much we should actually expect below that's one of the things we hope to do at some point we just need to find a target area so yeah thank you I was wondering what if there were any textual sources that you were engaging with or like what this region is referring to maybe like us pertaining in text are the text phones I know this is even in the Iron Age well I should say the Iron Age three periods basically create a sort of this area the war zone actually did have text and cuneiform but I'm not using any of those textual sources so there's mention of Armenia and the Byzantium description and I am not familiar enough with them as opinioning text to really know that any references to the Highland Journal but yeah we'd love to find a text we're hoping that there's like a Darius description right now there's like a a place name site or something in this other caucuses that is part of I'm not quite sure on the chronology part so basically the war two period is in between the Late Bronze and the Late Iron Age and that's the period we just don't have anything at our site now there's a lot of research that's been done about the war two but I just don't have a story to do it but basically what we're dealing with in the Early Bronze and the Late Bronze is pretty historic it's about empires and their winterlands that they may not be referring to this place but if you don't have a complimentary text on the basis you aren't necessarily going to be able to match those up that's so you know that there's this they have that flow through their relations with and they may be talking about you all the time but calling you something weird right absolutely yeah I mean it isn't really going to tell but if you're going to get a great text that we actually like really get an idea of what our media is but even then we don't know that takes our media to the extent that our media in the classical period and in the war two periods very different one of this today so we are technically at one o'clock I didn't see any other hands but before we walked out of the room was somebody else sitting there wanting to ask a question we have one last question might they be considered sissians what becomes sissians no the sissians are actually like on the other side of the caspian see I I mean yeah I told the same thing so on that note let's thank Amy