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Early Holocene sites with asymmetric triangles. Trialetian, Caspian and Anatolian variants: 1 -Komishan; 2 -Hotu; 3 -Belt; 4 -Ali Tappeh; 5 -Dam-Dam Cheshme I and II; 6 -Djebel; 7 -Kailu; 8 -Hodje-su; 9 -Nevali Cori; 10 -Hallan Çemi; 11 -Demirkoy; 12 -Kortic Tepe; 13 -Hasankeyf Höyük; 14 -Gusir Höyük; Trialetian, Transcaucasian variant: 15 -Chokh; 16 -Zurtaketi; 17 -Kotias Klde; Mixed Trialetian and Kobuletian complexes: 18 -Bavra; 19 -Darkvety (layer V); Shpan-Koba: 20 -Shpan-Koba; 21 -Fatma-Koba (layer III); 22 -Shan-Koba (layer IV); 23 -Su-At 3; 24 -Frontove 3; 25 -Vasylivka 1 and 3.
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The authors examine the development of Transcauca-sian archaeological cultures during the Early Holocene and their relationship to the beginning of the Neolithic in the south of Eastern Europe. The authors describe the migration activity of carriers of the Kobuletian, Darkvetian, Edzanian and Trialetian cultures. The role of migrants in the process...
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Similar publications
The authors examine the development of Transcaucasian archaeological cultures during the Early Holocene and their relationship to the beginning of the Neolithic
in the south of Eastern Europe. The authors describe the migration activity of carriers of the Kobuletian, Darkvetian, Edzanian and Trialetian cultures. The role
of migrants in the process...
Citations
... These sites have yielded forest and steppe environments in exclusive proximity to a massive obsidian source in the region (Connor and Sagona 2007). In their work, Manko and Chkhatarashvili (2022) highlight the most characteristic features of the Trialeti Mesolithic Culture, such as direct and indirect percussion in cores reduction strategy, asymmetric triangles, bitruncated facetted blades with backed edges, asymmetric lunates, bladelets with bipolar abrupt retouch, truncated facetted blades, symmetric triangles and the microburin technique. While the Neolithic presence is relatively limited in the adjacent area, rockshelters Paravani I and Paravani II are worth mentioning. ...
Trialeti is one of the key rock art sites in the Caucasus region. It provides a consistent reference for the rock art heritage of the southern Caucasus. This site offers diverse data to interpret the symbolic production and distribution in the area between Europe and Asia over several millennia. In this paper, we present the results of the most recent investigations carried out in 2022 that reappraise the significance of the Trialeti rock art site within the region. Our investigations focused on the specific area where rock art panels were documented nearly half a century ago. The surrounding landscape, characterised by volcanic-origin non-karstic caves and rockshelters, held significant interest for preHistoric and Historical societies.
... According to the latest studies (Manko, Chkhatarashvili, 2022;, at the beginning of the early Holocene, the tribes carrying the Mlefaatien culture begin to migrate to the territory of the Caucasus. As a result of the mentioned migration, the so-called Kobuleti culture appeared. ...
... This cultre are include following archaeological sites: Kobuleti (Gogitidze, 1978;2008), Anaseuli I-II (Nebieridze, 1972), Darteti rockshelter layer V (Nebieridze, 1978), Bavra, Bavra I-II (Gabunia, 2001;Gabunia, Tsereteli 2003), Bavra-Ablari (Varoutsikos et. al., 2017), Kvirike, Khutsubani (Gogitidze, 1978;Manko, Chkhatarashvili, 2022), Sosruko, layer M1-M2 (Zamjatnin, Akritas, 1957;Leonova, 2021) and others. ...
... Researcher Valery Manko has very interesting opinions on the migrations of the Mlefaatian culture and their role in the creation of the Neolithic culture in the territory of South-Eastern Europe, who connects the origin of the Kukrek culture in the territory of modern Crimea with the Mlefaatian migrants (for details, see Манко 2015; Manko, Chkhatarashvili, 2022). ...
The article provides a comprehensive account of two significant prehistoric archaeological sites located in Adjara - Kobuleti village and Khutsubani, including their history, modern investigations, and findings. The authors highlight that bone remains were not uncovered during the excavation of Stone Age archaeological sites due to the soil'speculiarities. These remains could have shed light on the hunting environment of that era. Stone artifacts provide insight into the lives of ancient hunter-gatherers in our regionThus, a thorough examination of the stone industry is very important. According to this analysis the authors, a fascinating conclusion is drawn regarding the origins of the Western Transcaucasia stone industry. During the early Holocene era, a new method of stone processing and various types of tools emerged within the aforementioned region. This innovative approach was originally developed in the territory of Iran and Iraq. It's a Mlefaatien culture, which comprises of many significant sites. After conducting a techno-typological analysis of the stone complex, it is believed that hand pressure techniques, backed microblades, Kashkashok side-blow blade-flakes, grooved tools etc. emerged in Western Georgia result of the great migration process from Middle East in the beginning of the 10th millennia BC. This view is supported by the complete range of precise dates, which accurately reflect the migrations ways and times of the early migrants. Additional inquiries in this field, conducted in the future, will undoubtedly uncover even more fascinating insights.
The Caucasus, situated strategically in terms of natural geography and abundant raw materials, has been attractive to the interest of prehistoric hunter-gatherers throughout ancient times. Recent discoveries at the Neolithic site of Makhvilauri in the Ajara region, affirm this historical focus. The Makhvilauri flaked stone tool assemblage encompasses various lithic resources, of which ~11 % (n = 59) comprise obsidian, a raw material whose closest sources are 170 km away. Using the XRF method at the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University
of Missouri Reactor Research (MURR) to elementally characterise 23 of the obsidian artifacts (~39 % of the total) we can demonstrate that the Makhvilauri assemblage was made from at least five geochemically distinct sources.
This analysis not only sheds light on the mobility patterns of ancient communities but also underscores the extensive contacts established during the Neolithic period (6th millennium BC).
In recent years, Ukrainian archaeologist V. O. Manko has been boldly revising key positions in traditional ideas about the Mesolithic and Neolithic of South-Eastern Europe, to which his latest article in the journal Arheologia, written in co-authorship with the Georgian researcher G. L. Chhatarashvili, is devoted. The article begins with a call to abandon the traditional definition of the Neolithic, proposed by the classic scholar of prehistory V. Gordon Childe (the Neolithic is the era of the invention and spread of the reproductive economy) and replace it with an innovative one: the Neolithic is an information system. Since everything in the world is a system, the question arises: What is the meaning and benefit of such an innovative definition of the Neolithic? The co-authors of the article resolutely reject the Balkan-Danube version of the neolithization of Central-Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine, founded by the already mentioned G. Child, as the brainchild of “improper research methodology”. Of course, the classics are also wrong, but a discussion with serious scientists requires serious argumentation, which, unfortunately, is catastrophically lacking in V. O. Manko’s constructions. The researcher proposes to replace the classical version of the neolithization of Europe from the Balkans through the Danube to the Caucasian route of the movement of Neolithic colonists to the Northern Black Sea; however, the arguments for his alternative are clearly insufficient. V. O. Manko boldly solves the complex problems of the genesis of a number of Mesolithic cultures of Ukraine and the Caucasus: Hrebenyky, Kukrek, Shpan-Koba, Swider, Mariupol and others. Loud revolutionary statements not supported by proper arguments and facts look like unconvincing declarations, which give rise to doubts and a skeptical attitude of the reader towards them. I will not claim that all the cultural communities highlighted in the article are illusory, and the migration routes from the Middle East through the Caucasus to the Black Sea region are ephemeral. However, the scant information on the typology of the flint inventory of cultural communities provided by its authors and clearly insufficient illustrative material in most cases does not allow imagining what it is actually about. Therefore, the topic chosen by the authors of the article of systematization of the cultural communities of the Mesolithic of the Caucasus and their cultural connections with the Black Sea region is definitely relevant, but its solution is complicated by the significant defects of the source base of the region and poor argumentation of the proposed hypotheses. Perhaps if the authors did not try to solve all the problems of the Mesolithic of the Caucasus and its neighboring regions in one article, then their conclusions would be more thorough, convincing and understandable for the readers.
Valerii Manko and Guram Chkhatarashvili published their article in the “Arheologia”, No. 2, 2022. In the paper, they discussed the migration of bearers of four Neolithic flint industries from Southwest Asia through the Caucasus to the south of Eastern Europe from the final Pleistocene to the early Atlantic. According to the authors, stable connections between these remote areas led to the emergence of four “information networks”, which they called “Cultural-Historical Regions” (CHR). The authors believe that the first region of such type in human history was the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) in the Near East. Therefore, they call the “theoretical basis” of their study “the idea of understanding the Neolithic as an epoch of the formation of global information networks, within which innovations created in the Near and Middle East were disseminated.”
V. Manko began to develop the described theoretical views in 2010 when he wrote that the reason for the emergence of the CHR is the ability to communicate, formed due to the mental changes of inhabitants of the PPNA large settlements. The statement about specific psyche and worldview as the basis of Neolithic has been expressed as an idea of Post-Processual archaeology long before V. Manko announced it. In particular, Trevor Watkins developed this concept in detail. However, V. Manko does not mention works by any post-processualists in his publications.
The statement about the formation of the ability to communicate only in the Neolithic is V. Manko’s novelty. He based it on one reference to a publication of Alexey N. Sorokin, who allegedly claimed that the bearers of different flint industries did not contact each other in the central part of European Russia in the Mesolithic. V. Manko misinterpreted this particular subjective observation and gave it the meaning of a global pattern. Thus, his definition of the Neolithic is controversial, because of using this erroneous premise. Generally, V. Manko’s theoretical reasoning is full of contradictions, logical errors, terminological chaos, and rhetoric in the postmodernism style. It is noteworthy that V. Manko himself does not fully adhere to his previous theoretical views in his later works.
