Archaeology conference at Ca' Foscari exploring "Timing Cultural Changes in the Southern Caucasus: Where do we stand with absolute chronology from Late Chalcolithic to the Iron Age?"

The conference is organised as part of the SPIN 2-2018 FRAC-SISCANEA project coordinated at Ca' Foscari by Prof. Elena Rova in the Department of Humanities. The project focuses on the chronology of the Shida Kartli province in Georgia in collaboration with Elisabetta Boaretto of the Scientific Archaeology Department of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. The conference programme includes a number of papers focusing on digs and discoveries in Mentesh Tepe, Soyuq Bulaq, Qaraçinar, Nakhchivan Tepe and Kiçik Tepe.
The aim of the workshop is to verify the state of the art of radiometric dates for cultures from the late Chalcolithic to the Iron Age of the South Caucasus in order to identify problematic issues on which future research should focus, such as insufficiently documented periods or regions. A second theme the conference explores is that of the serious problems of terminology affecting regional periodisations, which hinder the comparison between the different sequences supported by 14C. These include unclear or conflicting definitions of the different cultural assemblages and their chronospatial relationships and the characterization of "transient" phases and assemblages, which require an open comparison between scholars operating in different areas to reach a shared solution.