The main aim of the season was to continue excavation at the settlement of Tsiteli Gorebi 5 (Fig. 1), where three soundings had been opened in 2018. The site is part of a cluster of Chalcolithic sites (5th-4th millennium BC), collectively known in literature under the name of Tsiteli Gorebi, which are located close to the present village of Ulianovka/Tsitelgori in the southern part of the Lagodekhi Municipality. Some of them had been investigated in the late 1970s-early 1980s by V. Varazashvili (V. Varazashvili, 4th millennium BC. materials from the Iori-Alazani basin, in Works of the Kakheti Archaeological Expedition IV, Tbilisi 1980, 18-35, Id., Settlement of ,,Damtsvari Gora”. Result of the excavations carried out in 1980, in Kakheti Archaeological Expedition’s works VI, Tbilisi 1984, 19-26, Id., Rannezemledel’cheskaja kul’turaJuro-Alazanskogo Bassejna [The Early Farming Culture of the Iori-Alazani Basin], Tbilisi: Metsniereba 1992). The Soviet period excavation left several important questions unanswered, to start with the general chronology of the Tsiteli Gorebi settlements. In fact, although they had been attributed by the excavator to the first half of the 4th millennium, no 14C date could unfortunately be collected from them, so that their absolute date remains uncertain. It is also unclear whether they should be considered as strictly contemporary with each other, or as belonging to different sub-periods, especially since parallels drawn by the excavators for their ceramic repertoire spans from the Ceramic Neolithic to the Late Chalcolithic period.
The meaning of this cluster of settlements located at a short distance from each other in the framework of the general settlement pattern of Chalcolithic occupation in Eastern Georgia and their relation with the surrounding general environment are also still to be understood. In fact, Varazashvili’s excavations yielded abundant ceramic, lithic material and bone objects, but no architectural remains or preserved contexts with in situ material, to the exception of a number of storage pits, a few burials, and some enigmatic ditches. The lack of preserved architectural remains was tentatively explained with the fact that the upper part of the anthropic sequence had been destroyed by ploughing and intensive agriculture exploitation.
Our 2018 soundings at Tsiteli Gorebi 5 produced materials widely comparable to those discovered by the previous expeditions and confirmed the bad preservation of the anthropic levels in the area, specifically as concerns the almost total absence of organic remains. On the other hand, however, they resulted in the discovery of some wide walls, which suggested the presence at the site of significant architectural structures and encouraged us to plan further investigations.
A last open question is the relation of the Tsiteli Gorebi pottery and lithic assemblage with the earlier Neolithic tradition, with the local Sioni/Tsopi Chalcolithic cultures and with the Mesopotamian-related Chaff-Faced Ware tradition.
The aims of the 2019 excavation were the following:
1) to enlarge the surface of the investigated area, in the attempt to understand the general topography of the site and obtain some complete building plans;
2) to verify the site’s general stratigraphy and confirm that the site’s occupational sequence belongs to a single main period, as suggested by last year deep sounding (Sounding 1), but verify the possible existence, within this, of different sub-phases in the central part of the mound (Soundings 2 and 3 of 2018) where virgin soil had not been reached in the 2018 season
3) to better understand the reasons of the poor preservation of the archaeological remains: soil conditions, repeated flooding and/or water stagnation, various post-depositional disturbances etc., and their precise date;
3) to obtain a wider collection of artefacts and ecofacts for typological/functional study (pottery, lithics, worked bone), reconstruction of the ancient economy and paleoenvironment (animal bones, palynology), absolute dating (organic materials for 14C sampling) and archaeometric analyses (pottery, obsidian).
In order to investigate these issues, a 225 m2 area was opened on the top of the main (eastern) mound, which would allow to obtain a wider horizontal exposure and, at the same time, to reach the virgin soil at selected locations. In spite of the slightly late beginning of the excavation due to the unforeseen delay in harvesting the field, the work of the expedition could be carried out regularly and yielded very important results for the general interpretation of the site and its surrounding environment.
The devastating impact of post-World War II mechanised agriculture on the ancient settlements located to the north of the Alazani river was widely confirmed. The main elements of destruction of Tsiteli Gorebi 5 were identified in the artificial flattening of the low natural and anthropic elevations, in the excavation of a large irrigation/drainage canal crossing the top of the site in a SW-NE direction and of numerous large pits of circular and rectangular shape and, finally, in repeated ploughing which continues until the present day.
The large scale 2019 excavation allowed to understand that the ancient settlement was located on slightly elevated portions of territory, apparently divided from each other by artificial ditches, the soil excavated from which was accumulated on their sides and contributed to create well drained areas spared from water stagnation, on which the dwellings were located. Unfortunately, the remains of these had been obliterated over most of the excavation area by Soviet-Period operations, which erased the building levels to the bottom of the walls, and spread their remains all around, in particular in the filling of the large artificial canal, where we recovered most of them. Part of a Chalcolithic ditch delimiting one such occupation area was unearthed at the NE limit of the excavation. It run from south-east toward the north-west (where it had been cut by the modern canal).
In situ remains of the original occupational level were preserved only over a 10 x 10 m area at the SE limit of the excavation. They were located in a slightly depressed sector within the above mentioned raised area, a fact which had probably spared them from complete destruction. As already supposed after the 2018 soundings, they consisted of rectilinear architecture with rather wide walls in compacted clay/bricks with a general NE-SW orientation, whose max. preservation did not exceed 10-15 cm, and was also affected by the presence of numerous small pits, presumably dug from a now completely disappeared, later phase of the Chalcolithic occupation, as well as by a large number of modern animal burrows. At least one room measuring 2.20 x 3.20 m with remains of a plastered floor and parts of other spaces were identified. Unfortunately, no in situ material was recovered from them. A sounding at the eastern limit of the excavation area confirmed as well the presence, over the virgin soil, of another occupational layer with comparable walls and structures but with a different and slightly divergent orientation with similar traces of floors. The depth of this layer was, however, so limited and its preservation so poor (it also yielded no in situ material) that it appears doubtful whether a larger scale exposure of this earlier sub-phase could provide much additional information. As for the almost complete absence of any organic remains even from the modern occupational layers, we came to the conclusion that this is mostly due to the basic composition of the soil, which creates very unfavourable conditions to their preservation.
Work on the season’s finds (both artefacts and ecofacts) proceeded in the expedition house at Lagodekhi at the same time as the excavation. Samples for radiometric dating, palynology and archaeometric analysis (ceramics, obsidian) were also collected in the course of the season.
Besides excavating Tsiteli Gorebi 5, the expedition carried out the following activities:
1) Giovanni Boschian continued the geological survey of the surroundings of the site initiated in 2018, took samples for soil micromorphology analysis from archaeological levels at Tsiteli Gorebi 5, and excavated a small geological sounding in the plain to the east of the site in order to verify the sequence of natural depositions of the alluvial plain;
2) Giovanni Boschian and Stefania Fiori visited some possible archaeological sites indicated by locals and took GPS points on them as a preparation for the second survey season of the expedition, which is foreseen for October-November 2019;
3) Flavia Amato analysed and studied the lithic assemblage from the 2018 and 2019 seasons at Tsiteli Gorebi 5;
4) Giovanni Siracusano analysed the faunal assemblage from the 2018 and 2019 seasons at Tsiteli Gorebi 5;
5) Sara Stellacci analysed bone artefacts from the 2018 and 2019 seasons at Tsiteli Gorebi 5, as well as from the 2013-2017 seasons at Aradetis Orgora/Doghlauri of the Georgian-Italian Shida Kartli Archaeological Expedition, and carried out traces analysis on them;
6) Experimental 3D scansions of artefacts (pottery, obsidian, bone objects) and ecofacts (animal bones) were carried out by Flavia Amato on items from both the Tsiteli Gorebi 5 excavations and the Local Museum at Lagodekhi.
7) A series of three lessons of “Introduction to Archaeology” for local high school students were carried out on July 5th, 6th, and 8th in collaboration with the Lagodekhi Local Museum and the Italian Embassy in Tbilisi, under the responsibility of Megan Willmes.
