El activo transistor

Years of research at Vani and in the region surrounding it have encouraged the view that Vani was a center of political, religious and/or economic activity between the 8th and 1st

centuries BCE. During these seven centuries, the remains recovered from the site point to

increased investment in the built environment and an expanding use of material, both in quantity and type. In particular, the rich burials of the mid 5th- early 3rd centuries and the monumental architecture of the 3rd to 1st centuries suggests that Vani was an important place in the landscape. The type and scale of activity identified at the site from the mid to late 1st centuries BCE is unattested at other sites in the region,. From the available evidence then, Vani appears to be unique in its region and to be a site where specialized activity took place.

The top-down model used to explain Vani’s special character places emphasis on

material that points to the site’s growing connections with regional and extra-regional networks. The appearance at the site of exotic goods (imported ceramics, precious metals and stones), extra-regional architectural forms and foreign cultural practices are seen as the causes of change rather than the result of Vani’s growing importance. Within this model, Vani grows and is differentiated from other sites in the region due to its relationship with larger and more powerful centers located in Colchis and elsewhere. Evaluating Vani’s position within the landscape, however, requires the adoption of a bottom-up approach, one that focuses on the importance regional settlement and landscape use had on Vani’s development. That Vani grew in importance in the 1st millennium BCE is apparent, but to what extent this growth was unique and what effects this growth had on activity taking place in the region remain open questions.

II.1a. The Town and Its Sustaining Area

Archaeologists have developed a number of theoretical approaches to understanding the relationship between towns and the regions in which they are situated. These approaches rely on a set of basic assumptions about the conditions that encourage the formation of urbanized sites and that dictate their location, size and function. Broadly speaking, it is assumed that the location of any site is conditioned by two related but separate concerns: proximity to desired natural resources and the site’s physical relationship to loci of social activity (i.e. other sites, roads, or socially restricted areas). Given the nature of the archaeological evidence, building models that explain how sites acquired, or failed to acquire, the materials necessary to sustain themselves are particularly important to understanding a site’s existence. At the most basic level, sites require access to food and water, resources necessary to sustain the basic biological functions of the people living in, working at, or visiting the site. To these basic needs we must add access to the goods and material necessary to sustain and account for the activities attested in the

archaeological record. If the site shows signs of ceramic or metal production, for instance, access to the raw material must be accounted for and the distance or proximity of these resources can give clues to a site’s relationship with its social and natural landscape. Indeed, loci of social activity outside the boundaries of the site itself can be understood as resources, which sites differentially participate in based on their physical and social proximity. Approaches to

understanding the relationship between urbanized sites and their regions can thus be placed into two categories: those concerned with environmental relationships and those concerned with social relationships.

Site catchment is the most basic approach to understanding the relationship between sites and their immediate environs. Claudio Vita-Finzi and Eric Higgs first introduced site catchment

analysis in the 1970’s as a way of identifying and studying the resources available to any given site.2 Previous ethnographic work carried out by Richard Lee on the !Kung Bushman and Michael Chisholm’s study of European peasant farming suggested that resource acquisition and use was distance dependent. During his fieldwork, Lee observed that foragers were unlikely to walk more than 10 kilometers or two hours from their base. Groups of hunters, however, might roam beyond 10 kilometers, but if they did they would often make a separate overnight camp.3 Studying European peasant agricultural practice, Chisholm concluded that it was very rare for farmers to travel more than 3-4 kilometers or one hour to their fields.4 With these studies in mind, Vita-Finzi and Higgs drew circles with diameters of 5 kilometers around sites to be studied, figuring that this was the most likely area to be heavily exploited by the prehistoric peoples they were studying. By carefully analyzing the natural resources present within the catchment zone, Vita-Finzi and Higgs believed they could better understand a site’s function and modes of subsistence.

Although site catchment analysis has become an important component of regional studies, there are some rather serious limitations to the approach. Moreover, site catchments are not static as new technologies, may encourage or discourage the exploitation of the available resources and make the catchment more or less productive. Shifts in the productivity of a catchment may result in increased investment in both the catchment area and the site itself, resulting in a rise in the site’s relative importance in the region. Moreover, access to resources and social relationships may increase and decrease and other sites located within a site’s catchment go through changes in their relative positions. And these distances need to be

2 _{Vita-Finzi and Higgs (1970).} 3 _{Lee (1968).}

mediated by social relationships. Catchment productivity is an important determent of site location, its size and ultimately its function, but it is clearly not the only factor. This is why consideration of the social landscape is so important and why both the VRS and EVS projects are concerned with settlement patterning around Vani.

II.1b. The Town and Its Neighbors Town

Regional archaeological studies are predicated on the assumption that there is more than one archaeological site in a landscape. The location of the various loci of human activity

identified in a region and their proximity to each other provide information not only on regional patterns of activity, but also contextualize particular sites and the material recovered from them. Although settlement pattern analysis has been criticized, particularly from a post-processualist perspective5, it continues to be a robust means of studying political, economic and social

development on a regional scale.6 The perceived patterning in the spacing, number, size, use and location of loci of activity, or “sites”, provide spatial and temporal proxy data for the regional organization of social systems. These patterns are the result of repeated and intentional human behavior that is conditioned by environmental, social and historical factors.

The early applications of settlement pattern analysis expected that the size, density and location of artifact scatters related directly to the scale and organization of settlement systems,

assuming a close and uncomplicated correspondence between surface and subsurface remains. 7

This view has since been challenged by the recognition of a number of methodological and post-

5 _{Tilley (1994); Witcher (2006).}

6 _{For arguments in favor of settlement pattern analysis and its utility, see Earle and Kolb (2010);} Bintliff et al. (2000) and Banning (2002).

depositional biases that affect the character of surface remains.8 Additionally, concepts such as

memory and landscape were put forward to challenge the direct link between settlement pattern

and socio-political organization.9 Rather than causing the abandonment of settlement pattern studies, these critiques led to a refining of theoretical and methodological approaches which recognized the importance the landscape plays in conditioning human behavior and affecting the visibility of remains on the surface.

There are a number of ways to compare and understand sites in a given region, but the most prevalent in contemporary archaeology is settlement pattern analysis through the

identification of a site hierarchy.10 Archaeological studies of regions have been preoccupied with establishing site hierarchies since the introduction of settlement pattern analysis in the 1950’s.11 Using concepts drawn from Central Place Theory12, a site hierarchy is established by comparing sites within a region based on their size, function and location within the landscape. The most commonly used criteria for comparison is site size, which is used as an indicator for the number of people using the site and/or the intensity of that activity and thus the sites relative importance to the regions social organization. Big sites are more important than little sites and are likely to have served as the centers of economic, political and/or religious activity.

8 _{Terrenato (2004).}

9 _{Tilley (1994); Van Dyke and Alcock (2003).}

10 _{Early proponents of settlement hierarchies were Earle (1977) abd Peebles and Kus (1977).} Settlement hierarchies are seen as essential to the functioning of tribute and tax systems, see Steponaitis (1978). In the Mediterranean World, Driessen (2001) uses settlement hierarchy to understand the political organization of Minoan Crete. Pantou (2010) uses settlement hierarchy to argue against the existence of a central place in the Bay of Volos.

11 _{Willey (1953).}

All approaches to understanding the organization of regional settlement require some understanding of site size or function.13 In regions, like that around Vani, where clear metrics to compare site size and function are difficult to acquire using traditional methods, approaches that focus on economic, political, and social relationships as determinants of site location are

untenable. The first step in these regions is to develop a program of investigation that allows for the identification and categorization of the range of activities, their boundaries, and their

distribution in the landscape.

The identification of Vani as a central place in the landscape is based on the presence at the site of specialized architecture, exotic materials, craft production, surplus storage and elite display in burial contexts. This suite of features does not appear all at once, nor are all of them contemporary, but taken as a whole these features clearly mark Vani as a special place in the landscape. Attempts to understand the emergence have assumed the presence of a settlement hierarchy of which Vani occupied a secondary tier with the primal site likely situated within the territory of Kutaisi. Indeed, evidence at Vani shows that in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, it may have been connected to other centers in Western Georgia, but the nature of these

connections are unclear. Less attention, however, has been given to the organization of the region around Vani and what that has to say about the potential primacy of the site within the local settlement hierarchy, if in fact there was such a hierarchy.