Wild useful plants in the Paleolithic of the South Caucasus – their natural availability in paleolandscapes and their potential use under changing cultural skills

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Angela Bruch
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558487406

The landscape of the Southern Caucasus has offered ideal living conditions for humans for almost two million years, as evidenced by the numerous Paleolithic sites in the region of today’s Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Although with the changing climate and increasing cultural abilities, different groups of people certainly had a completely different way of dealing with their environment. With its focus on plant resources, this project aims to study useful wild plants of the Southern Caucasus, their natural availability in different Pleistocene landscapes, and the cultural skills required for their exploitation. The main objectives here are to quantify the available plant resources for different human groups in Armenia from the Lower to Upper Paleolithic, considering on the one hand the predominant vegetation that covered the landscape at specific times in the past and on the other hand the respective technological skills required to exploit these landscapes are to be compared. Therefore, the project will reconstruct the paleovegetation in the Armenian Highlands for different Pleistocene periods based on statistical relationships between regional vegetation and pollen from recent soil surface samples. The reconstructed landscapes will be evaluated for the availability of useful wild plants for both food and other resources. In parallel, archaeological evidence is compiled for the technological capabilities required to utilize those plants. Reducing the list of plants potentially available in the landscape to those that can actually be used by groups with different abilities will make it possible to quantify the availability of plant resources for different Paleolithic groups in Armenia. Comparing these results will provide in-depth insights into the evolution of human capabilities to use the landscapes of the Southern Caucasus. Innovations during the Middle and Upper Paleolithic should have brought benefits in terms of plant use, possibly explaining the long coexistence of these groups in the region and/or their final replacement. Highly developed plant use most likely contributed to the survival of humans during glacial periods in this mountainous area.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Armenia
• Co-Investigator: Privatdozentin Dr. Miriam Noël Haidle
• International Co-Applicant: Professor Dr. Ivan Gabrielyan