Khashuri Natsargora: The Early Bronze Age Graves

This volume is the first part of the final publication of the Early Bronze Age levels of Khashuri Nastargora. This important site of the Kura-Araxes and Early Kurgan period in the Shida Kartli region of Georgia, excavated in the 1980s by a Georgian mission, was since then left unpublished. The joint “Georgian-Italian Shida Kartli Archaeological Project” carried out a thorough revision of the old excavation documentation and a study of the original finds, and integrated them with new archaeometric analyses and research on the site’s ancient environment The volume contains a general introduction to the site and its environment and the analysis of the Kura-Araxes graves; it also includes a study of the Early Bronze Age cemeteries in the Shida Kartli region. It represents a significant contribution to the still limited corpus of evidence about this cultures published in English available to the specialists of  Near Eastern and Caucasian archaeology.

Elena Rova is researcher and lecturer at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research field is the archaeology of Upper Mesopotamia and the neighbouring areas (Anatolia, Transcaucasia) in the 4^th and 3^rd millennium BC.

Marina Puturidze is professor at Tbilisi State University. She is a specialist of the archaeology of Transcaucasia in the Bronze Age, with a special interest for the connections of the Transcaucasian cultures with the Near East.