Khashuri Natsargora - The Early Bronze Age Graves: Publications of the Georgian-Italian Shida Kartli Archaeological Project I

This volume is the first part of the final publication of the Early Bronze Age levels of Khashuri Nastargora. This important site of the Kura-Araxes and Early Kurgan period in the Shida Kartli region of Georgia, excavated in the 1980s by a Georgian mission, was since then left unpublished. The joint Georgian-Italian Shida Kartli Archaeological Project carried out a thorough revision of the old excavation documentation and a study of the original finds, and integrated them with new archaeometric analyses and research on the site's ancient environment. The volume contains a general introduction to the site and its environment and the analysis of the Kura-Araxes graves; it also includes a study of the Early Bronze Age cemeteries in the Shida Kartli region. It represents a significant contribution to the still-limited corpus of evidence about this culture that is published in English and available to specialists of Near Eastern and Caucasian archaeology.