Resilience in the Diaspora; An Archaeological Approach

Resilience is not limited either to one strategy or approach nor happened in a short time as an event. It is a long-term process with different cycles of events and should be studied in Longue durée. Archaeology, with its potential, is one of the disciplines that could address this issue by providing the “episodical patterns” of resilience at “temporal or spatial scales”. In this lecture, taking one archaeological case study into account, the conceptualization of “resilience” is discussed. 

The Kura-Araxes groups migrated in the last part of the 4th millennium BCE from their homeland in the southern Caucasus to Iran, eastern Anatolia (Turkey), as far as the Levant. Migrating to the new lands requires different management and new strategies of adaptation and higher flexibility in resource-management strategies and even internal societal organization. We consider all of these processes, the way they formed their habitus, as resilience efforts of the Kura-Araxes to adapt themselves to the new land. This study will showcase how the concept of resilience makes it possible to examine past societies from different perspectives through interdisciplinary methods, which provides a deeper understating of the mechanism that determines resilience among past societies.