Rediscovering Tsaghkasar: Surveying a Kura-Araxes Highland Settlement in Armenia
Jamie Fraser, 2026 Stevan B. Dana Grant Recipient
With support from an ASOR Stevan B. Dana Project Grant, an international team of archaeologists spent three weeks in August and September 2026 investigating one of Armenia’s remarkable prehistoric highland settlements. The Tsaghkasar Archaeological Project (TsAP) set out to answer a deceptively simple question: just how large was this Kura-Araxes settlement, and what can its remains tell us about life in the Armenian highlands more than 5,000 years ago? By the end of this season, our discoveries had transformed our understanding of the site.
The project brings together researchers from the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, and the Near Eastern Archaeology Foundation in Australia. Our team combined Armenian expertise in the archaeology of the South Caucasus with international specialists in archaeological survey, material culture, and environmental archaeology,
Tsaghkasar occupies a spectacular position on the southwestern slopes of Mount Aragats, Armenia’s highest mountain. At approximately 2,080 meters above sea level, the site overlooks an immense landscape of rolling grasslands, volcanic outcrops, and deeply incised valleys. On clear mornings, the distant summit of Mount Ararat rises above the horizon.
This dramatic setting raises important archaeological questions. How did prehistoric communities establish and sustain substantial settlements at such elevations? And what combination of agriculture, animal husbandry, and access to natural resources made highland life possible?
Tsaghkasar first attracted archaeological attention in 1985, when a survey identified Kura-Araxes pottery and architectural remains exposed by Soviet-era pipeline construction. Between 2005 and 2008, Pavel Avetisyan, of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, directed Armenian-German excavations in four trenches, uncovering substantial stone-built structures, pottery, and storage pits containing evidence of prehistoric cereal cultivation. Although these excavations are unpublished, they established Tsaghkasar as an important Kura-Araxes settlement. Our 2026 project builds directly on this pioneering work, extending archaeological investigation beyond the excavated areas to examine the scale and organization of the wider settlement.
Our first challenge was to establish precisely what survived on the ground. Using high-resolution drone photography, we produced detailed imagery of the landscape, revealing subtle variations in the terrain and possible traces of ancient architecture. Surveyor Guy Hazell then established a georeferenced grid using precision satellite-positioning equipment. The landscape was divided into 50 × 50-meter squares, providing a systematic framework for recording archaeological features and collecting surface artifacts.
The team walked each square in closely spaced transects, generally 10 meters apart, searching for pottery, chipped stone, and architectural remains. This painstaking fieldwalking also allowed us to ground-truth the drone imagery: features that appeared as faint lines or shadows in aerial photographs could be examined directly, identified, measured, and recorded.
Some of the most exciting moments came when apparently isolated stones resolved into coherent wall lines and architectural arrangements. Each newly recorded feature helped us reconstruct the organization of a settlement that had lain exposed, yet largely unrecognized, across the mountainside for millennia.
The artifacts confirmed that the landscape preserved substantial evidence of Kura-Araxes I occupation, broadly dating to the late fourth/early third millennium BCE. The ceramic assemblage includes fragments of the distinctive handmade pottery polished to a deep, glossy black, often with a contrasting red or buff interior, and decorated with raised geometric shapes, while the chipped-stone assemblage is overwhelmingly dominated by obsidian, the volcanic glass prized throughout prehistoric Armenia for its exceptionally sharp cutting edges.
The most striking result, however, was the scale of the archaeological remains. In just three weeks, we mapped an 11-hectare settlement core, characterized by extensive surface architecture and concentrations of artifacts. Beyond this core, we recorded substantial peripheral stone enclosures, provisionally interpreted as animal corrals, within a wider archaeological and activity zone extending across approximately 40 hectares.
These results establish Tsaghkasar as a significant Kura-Araxes highland settlement. Its size is especially noteworthy at an elevation exceeding 2,000 meters, challenging any simple assumption that upland communities were necessarily small, marginal, or exclusively pastoral. Whether all parts of the settlement were occupied simultaneously remains an important question for future excavation. For our team, the excitement lies not simply in the dimensions of the site, but in the possibility of understanding how its inhabitants organized their settlement, cultivated crops, managed livestock, and negotiated the opportunities and challenges of the highland environment.
We hope to develop this successful pilot survey into a multi-year program of excavation and interdisciplinary research, testing our interpretations of the architecture and enclosures, refining the settlement’s chronology, and recovering new evidence for the lives of its inhabitants.
We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support of the American Society of Overseas Research through its Stevan B. Dana Project Grant, the Curtiss T. and Mary G. Brennan Foundation, the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, and the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research.
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