The paper presents the results of interdisciplinary research carried out at the Kobuleti Early Holocene site. Typological and use-wear analyses of stone artifacts helped to define the main branch of the economy of humans at the site. Palynological studies were conducted to reconstruct the paleoenvironment. The investigated plant spores proved that the climate in the Early Holocene was warm. Definition of an absolute date by means of the radiocarbon method (14C) represents an innovation conducted in the study of the Stone Age in Ajara.

No abstract

Layers of the Namcheduri II settlement (Western Georgia) dated from the 5th-4th centuries BC have been studied by the palynological method. It revealed that cereals represented the main component of the population’s diet in the discussed period. The nutritive ratio included chestnut, hazel, walnut, and grapes. The majority of the plants apparently used for medical purposes represent medicinal remedies against rheumatism, arthritis, and diarrhea. Presumably, malaria, diabetes, and epilepsy occurred rarely since the medicinal remedies used against them were poorly evidenced. Plenty of eggs of parasitic worms discovered in the group of non-pollen palynomorphs in some samples and their taxonomic variety indicates at wide spreading of helminthosis in the population in the period under discussion. Eggs of Trichuris trichuira, Ascaris lumbricoides, Capillaria, Enterobius vermicularis, Yokogava fluke were present. The abundance and diversity of eggs of parasitic worms in the obtained material gives grounds for supposition that this part of the settlement was used as a latrine.

Pichvnari lies on the Black Sea coast of Georgia, at the confluence of the Choloki and Ochkhamuri rivers, some 10km to the north of the town of Kobuleti in the Ajarian Autonomous Republic (fig 1). The site has been known since the 1950s, and excavations were carried out in both the settlement and its various cemeteries in succeeding years, under the auspices of the Batumi Archaeological Museum and the Batumi Research Institute. The site was surveyed and a notional grid-plan imposed, within which subsequent work was recorded. By the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989–90, the Pichvnari Expedition was a fixture in the Georgian archaeological calendar, but with the abrupt decline in the Georgian economy this happy state of affairs came to an end.In 1998, however, work started again in collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In the spring of that year, the dig-house (part of an old kolkhoz, collective farm) was restored with the aid of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust. The roof was mended, and water and electricity laid on. The first season took place in July and August, when work (briefly reported in Vickers 1998) was conducted in the areas of both the North, or ‘Colchian’, and West, or ‘Greek’, Cemeteries.

No abstract