Human Settlement in Mountains and Its Built Environment

Abstract

The Caucasian mountain ranges of the Greater and Lesser Caucasus are highlands where people have been sedentary since the Neolithic period. Like in many of the mountains of western Eurasia, settlement oscillated between mobile and sedentary lifeways of the inhabitants, which goes hand in hand with very different forms of the built environment. Particularly in the Bronze and Iron Ages, complex pastoral settlement systems formed, culminating in the state-organized territorial structure of the Urartian kingdom, which partly was located in the South Caucasus. The chapter presents an overview of the organization of the Caucasian mountains as a habitat and domestic space used by mobile and semi-stationary pastoral peoples of the Bronze Age and by the sedentary and partly state-organized communities of the Early Iron Age. Using a case study from the North Caucasus, whose residential and economic architecture is exemplary for construction methods and techniques in high mountain regions, architectural environments and the elements that characterized built-up mountainscapes are discussed.