Project ArAGATS 1998-2018: Twenty years of archaeological investigations into the Bronze and Iron Ages of Armenia

The year 2018 marked the 20th anniversary of the joint Armenian-American Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies, a collaboration more parsimoniously known as Project ArAGATS. The project was originally conceived as an effort to define long-term processes of social, economic, and political change in the South Caucasus across the Bronze and Iron Ages at a regional scale. In addition to introducing methods of intensive systematic survey to the region, the work of the project has unfolded in an integrated series of excavations conducted across multiple sites and bolstered by a wide range of analytical techniques. The result has been not only new data on the ancient South Caucasus but also a new model for the practice of international collaborative research in archaeology.