What does empire look like from spaces where multiple imperial projects converge? Through analysis of Molla Nasraddin, a pioneering satirical magazine from the early twentieth-century Caucasus, I reveal local engagements with empire that defy traditional binaries of center versus periphery, indigenous versus foreign, and resistance versus accommodation. While critical scholarship has powerfully demonstrated how imperial power shapes local life—from technologies of rule to cultural categories and patterns of inequality—such analysis is typically conducted through the lens of a single empire. In the Caucasus, where Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian empires overlapped, Molla Nasraddin developed a distinctive blend of visual satire, character types, and multilingual wordplay that functioned as a form of satirical pedagogy, cultivating what I term “inter-imperial literacy”: the capacity to recognize deep connections between neighboring imperial worlds while maintaining critical distance from each. Through sustained correspondence with readers across three empires during their near-simultaneous revolutionary upheavals (1905–1908), the magazine gave voice to a public defined not by fixed identities but by their capacity for protean transformations across imperial boundaries. While nation-states would eventually redraw the Caucasus, Molla Nasraddin provides a window into a moment when historical borderlands—not imperial centers—offered the most penetrating insights into the workings of empire. In these spaces, elements adopted from competing empires become creative resources for local expression, while apparent cultural alignments conceal critical distance, enabling views of empire at once intimate and askance.

The great technological and typological variability identified among the Middle Palaeolithic (MP) assemblages previously assigned to the Zagros Mousterian in the Zagros suggests that this industry is not a homogeneous cultural unit. The archaeological record from the Caucasus and Armenian highlands contributes important data to understand the variability of the Zagros Mousterian. The authors show that the long stratigraphic sequences of the caves of Taglar in the Lesser Caucasus and Yerevan-1 in the Armenian highlands provide a line of development (the ‘Yerevan–Taglar tradition’) of the Zagros Mousterian variant in this region at least from 60/55 to 40 kya. The earliest manifestations of the Zagros Mousterian in the regions may be dated to the early MIS 5 or earlier. The MP assemblages from the cave of Saradj-Chuko and two other MP sites in the Terek river basin represent the northern Caucasian variant of the Zagros Mousterian, which existed in the region from MIS 5 to MIS 3. The remains of Neanderthals associated with the Zagros Mousterian assemblages in the Zagros and Caucasus clearly indicate that the makers of this cultural tradition were Neanderthals.

Since 2020, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh has intensified, culminating in a 44-day war in 2020 and an Azerbaijani military offensive in September 2023 when Azerbaijan reclaimed control over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory. This has ushered in a new phase of the Karabakh peace process amidst a transformed security landscape in the Caucasus. Against the background of a more general reconceptualization of Armenia’s role in the region, shifting away from its traditional alliance with Russia towards closer ties with the West, the article examines the role of women in Armenia in this peace process and their postwar opportunities for agency. The analysis reveals that women’s substantive inclusion in Armenia’s peace process remains limited due to (1) elite-dominated hard power negotiation structures and militarized discourses, (2) societal and economic factors, and (3) “self-exclusion” of women and the need for empowerment. Despite these challenges, the article identifies opportunities for women to assert agency in Armenia’s new security environment, contributing to a more effective, sustainable, and inclusive peace process.

The present article is a study of Ottoman military recruitment attempts of Circassians in the northwestern Caucasus. It examines the process of realizing a Circassian highlander army and the administration of the Anapa fortress during the time of two different fortress commanders. Focusing on the deeds of these two pashas regarding Circassian recruitment and their social background, this study highlights the Ottoman-Circassian relations and the dynamics of loyalty and pragmatism. Specifically, the role of provincial networks in ruling the border fortresses and regional politics in the Eastern Black Sea have been underlined within the context of the Russian-Ottoman rivalry over the Caucasus. Rebutting the importance of the origins of Ottoman officers for Ottoman borderland politics, this study argues that the contribution of provincial notables to the Ottoman civilizing mission and the Circassian army project in the early nineteenth century has been indispensable to the realization of Ottoman establishment in the Caucasus.

The game of fifty-eight holes is one of the longest recognized games of antiquity, but also one of the least understood. New evidence from the Caspian littoral points to an early adoption of the game by Middle Bronze Age seasonally pastoral cattle herders in the late third millennium and early second millennium bc. Six boards bearing this game's distinct pattern were found at sites on the Abşeron Peninsula and Gobustan Reserve in Azerbaijan. Their presence there not only indicates that the region was connected to societies to the south, but also demonstrates the game's popularity across cultures and socioeconomic groups. Its supposed first appearance in Egypt is questioned in favour of a south-western Asian origin.

Multiproxy sedimentary sequence analysis constitutes the basis for reconstructions of past paleoenvironments and climate evolution. These sequences are, for the most part, obtained by coring in lakes, maars or crater lakes whose waters can record volcanic activity or karstic contributions, especially in Eastern Anatolia and the Lesser Caucasus. The reservoir age effect in these geological contexts leads to an apparent aging of the radiocarbon ages which also affects the plants and animals developing in or near these waters and consequently the population consuming them. We present here some results obtained from modern samples taken from Mediterranean, central and eastern Anatolian lakes, from the Van and Sevan lakes and along the Kura River and its tributaries from the Lesser Caucasus. The effect of volcanic CO2 outgassing in the vicinity of maar crater lakes is also discussed.

A basic hypothesis is that cultural evolutionary processes sustain differences between groups, these differences have evolutionary relevance and they would not otherwise occur in a system without cultural transmission. The empirical challenge is that groups vary for many reasons, and isolating the causal effects of culture often requires appropriate data and a quasi-experimental approach to analysis. We address this challenge with historical data from the final Soviet census of 1989, and our analysis is an example of the epidemiological approach to identifying cultural variation. We find that the fertility decisions of Armenian, Georgian and Azeri parents living in Soviet-era Russia were significantly more son-biased than those of other ethnic groups in Russia. This bias for sons took the form of differential stopping rules; families with sons stopped having children sooner than families without sons. This finding suggests that the increase in sex ratios at birth in the Caucasus, which began in the 1990s, reflects a cultural preference for sons that predates the end of the Soviet Union. This result also supports one of the key hypotheses of gene–culture coevolution, namely that cultural evolutionary processes can support group-level differences in selection pressures that would not otherwise occur in a system without culture.

The deposition of intentionally damaged metal artefacts within burials and hoards is a phenomenon attested in areas as disparate as Ireland and the Caucasus during the Bronze and Iron Ages. While ritual significance is often attributed to such damage in burial contexts, the intentions behind the inclusion of damaged objects in hoards remain enigmatic. This article synthesises evidence for the intentional destruction of metal artefacts from 70 sites in the territory of modern Georgia and analyses patterns of deliberate damage over time and space. The study of these damaged artefacts enhances our understanding of ritual practice at a local level and locates the south Caucasus within the wider networks of this phenomenon.

The Bronze Age Maikop kurgan is one of the most richly furnished prehistoric burial mounds in the northern Caucasus. Its excavation in 1897 yielded a set of gold and silver tubes with elaborate tips and decorative bull figurines. Interpretations of these tubes include their use as sceptres and as poles to support a canopy. Re-examination of these objects, however, suggests they were used as tubes for the communal drinking of beer, with integral filters to remove impurities. If correct, these objects represent the earliest material evidence of drinking through long tubes—a practice that became common during feasts in the third and second millennia BC in the ancient Near East.

The expansion of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates (seventh to ninth centuries AD) brought diverse regions from the Indus Valley to the Eurasian Steppe under hegemonic control. An overlooked aspect of this political process is the subsequent translocation of species across ecological zones. This article explores species introduction in the early Islamic world, presenting the first archaeological evidence for domestic water buffalo in the Caucasus—identified using zooarchaeological and ZooMS methods on material from the historical site of Bardhaʿa in Azerbaijan. We contextualise these finds with historical accounts to demonstrate the exploitation of medieval marginal zones and the effects of centralised social reorganisation upon species dispersal.

This paper reports on radiocarbon (14C) results from the recent archaeological investigations in the ancient frontier fortress of Rabati, in southwest Georgia, a collaborative research project involving archaeologists from the Georgian National Museum and the University of Melbourne. From the first three excavation seasons spanning 2016, 2018, and 2019, it became clear that significant Bedeni phase deposits capped most of the summit of the site. Levels with their distinctive vessels and a range of contemporary, local domestic wares, pits and some traces of architecture seal underlying Early Bronze Age strata. The Early Bronze Age levels include massive architecture rarely seen in Kura-Araxes settlements. Some finds can only be described as unique and extraordinary while others suggest that the core population was stable with long-held traditions, yet open to new influences infiltrating this highland site during the subsequent Early Kurgan (Martkopi-Bedeni) period. We discuss the key discoveries at Rabati relative to the 14C readings from the site within the wider setting of contemporary sites in the Caucasus.