Passing into the Mountains: A Landscape Investigation of the Vedi River Valley of Armenia

Abstract

The Vedi river valley sits along the southeastern edge of the Ararat plain in Armenia, with the Vedi river flowing into the Araxes river. A large fortress, likely built in the Late Bronze Age and reused into the Medieval period, protects the entrance to the valley and highlights the significance of this valley as a transportation route throughout history. This route connects the plain of the Araxes up into the Gegham mountain range to the east - with Lake Sevan laying beyond to the northeast and Syunik province to the southeast. Thus, here a broad and fertile agricultural zone links to the mineral-rich mountains, which still invite copper and gold extraction today. In order to better understand past life and mobility in this valley as part of a field project begun in 2019, we are undertaking a landscape investigation of the valley to map sites as well as to characterize transportation and local land use. We hope to contribute to the dialogue on the archaeology of life at plain-mountain intersections. Our research deploys the usual landscape archaeological toolkit - site mapping, least cost path analysis, and remote sensing - while also experimenting with machine learning. Building off our 2019 surface survey, we hope that travel restrictions will soon ease so we can ground-truth our latest remote sensing results. Initial indications are that a network of fortresses protected multiple sections of the route up into the valley in at least the Medieval period.