Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 49 (2) 2021   doi:10.17746/1563-0110.2021.49.2.043-052

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An Early Bronze Age Hoard of Bronze Tools from Dvin,
Central Armenia

B. Gasparyan¹ and S.N. Korenevskiy²

¹Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, Charentsa 15, Yerevan, 0025, Armenia

²Institute of Archaeology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Dm. Ulyanova 19, Moscow, 117292, Russia

We describe a hoard found in 2018 on a hilltop near the village of Dvin, Armenia, and comprising seven daggers and six adzes. Similar pickaxes and adzes were found in caches at Dzhrashen, Yerevan, and at Nahal-Mishmar, Israel. A peculiar feature of the Dvin adzes is that their blades are sharply rounded, resembling those of the Bronze Age battle axes. All the Dvin daggers belong to a single type, similar to tangless daggers of the Maikop culture, but more robust. Results of an X-ray diffraction analysis show that the Yerevan, as well as the Dvin, specimens are made of arsenic bronze, whose source is hard to determine. Judging by the typology and the presence of blanks, the Dvin hoard indicates local metalworking, a production of artisans working in the southern part of the Alaverdy mining area. According to GPS, the direct distance between the Dvin and Yerevan hoards is just 13 km. Both locations apparently belonged to one and the same metalworking region in Armenia, and both hoards date to the late 5th to early 4th millennia BC.

Keywords: Armenia, hoard, dagger, adze, axe, dating