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Researchers used drone imagery to analyze the full scope of a massive, 3,000-year-old fortress in the Caucasus mountains.
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Digitally stitching together 11,000 images, they created a complete map of the Late Bronze Age fortress.
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Archaeologists hope the tens of thousands of artifacts buried at the settlement will help tell the story of the people who once lived there.
When researchers walked the mountainous Bronze Age fortress in the South Caucasus mountains in 2018, they had no idea that the ruins they could see were just the tip of the iceberg. But after taking to the skies and utilizing 11,000 drone-shot images to map the structure, they realized that the 3,000-year-old Dmanisis Gora was likely the largest fortress of its kind in the region.
In 2018, researchers discovered a fortified promontory between two deep gorges in the Caucasus Mountains, which serves as a boundary between Europe and Asia. The site had both and inner and outer fortress wall, and the remains of ancient stone structures visible to the researchers. But it was all too large to map on foot, so researchers form Cranfield University turned to technology for help.
“That was what sparked the idea of using a drone to assess the site from the air,” Nathaniel Erb-Satullo, senior lecturer in architectural science at the Cranfield Forensic Institute, said in a statement. “The drone took nearly 11,000 pictures which were knitted together using advanced software to produce high-resolution digital elevation models and orthophotos—composite pictures that show every point as if you were looking straight down.”
The team shared the findings in a study published in the journal Antiquity, and highlighted how stitching the data together created “accurate maps of all the fortification walls, graves, field systems, and other stone structures within the outer settlement.” The site turned out to be more than 40 times larger than originally thought, and featured an over-half-a-mile-long fortification wall.
“The exceptional size of Dmanisis Gora helps add new dimensions to population aggregation models in Eurasia and beyond,” the authors wrote in the study.
Comparing the new photos with 50-year-old Cold War-era spy satellite images of the region, which were declassified in 2013, the Cranfield team was able to assess the entire ancient settlement, and see how it had and hadn’t changed.
“The use of drones has allowed us to understand the significance of the site and document it in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible on the ground,” Erb-Satullo said. “Dmanisis Gora isn’t just a significant find for the Southern Caucasus region but has a broader significance for the diversity in the structure of large-scale settlements and their formation processes.”
According to the researchers, the two fortified walls functioned together for protection. They were both made with rough boulders and mortar, creating six-foot-thick shields against outside forces. “If the occupation of the inner fortress and outer settlement were roughly contemporary, as we suggest,” the authors wrote in the study, “this settlement would be one of the largest known in the South Caucasus Late Bronze and Iron Age.”
The team believes that Dmanisis Gora continued to expand over time, as mobile pastoral groups joined the settlement. But part of the population may have been seasonal. Relatively few artifacts were found within the outer wall, which indicated that it was likely a less densely populated space. That, in turn, meant that the fortress may have only been used in certain times of the year. The team hopes to study the site further to understand functions of specific areas, and learn about everything from population density and intensity to livestock movements and agricultural practices.
Work is already underway at the site to pull out what the researchers claim are “tens of thousands” of pottery shards, animal bones, and other artifacts that go deeper than the stone walls.
Erb-Satullo believes understanding Dmanisis Gora could help tell the story of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age societies and how settlements during that time adapted. Hopefully, he’s right.
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