Iron Age Armenia: Echoes of the Highlands

The period between 1150 and 420 BCE in the Armenian Highlands is a time of transformation. Following the upheavals at the end of the Late Bronze Age, local communities reconfigured social landscapes: fortified settlements grew on hilltops, metalworking intensified, and new burial patterns spread across valleys and plateaus. Archaeological data from named cemeteries — Bover Cemetery, Pijut Archaeological Complex, Bragdzor cemetery, Noratus and Sarukhan — provide a patchwork of mortuary evidence and material culture that speak to regional identities forming during the Early Iron Age.

Excavations show continuity with Bronze Age traditions alongside novel influences from neighboring Anatolia and the Zagros. Limited but telling indicators—grave orientations, weapon fragments, and pottery types—suggest households and networks that balanced pastoral mobility with emerging craft specialization. Chronologically, these sites sit within a broader timeline that includes the rise of regional polities in the 1st millennium BCE; archaeologists often link material change in eastern Anatolia and the southern Caucasus with changing trade and political connections.

Archaeological data indicates a landscape of resilient highland communities negotiating long-distance ties. While the material record sketches broad patterns, the integration of ancient DNA gives a complementary line of evidence to test models of continuity, migration and exchange.

Fourteen individuals from Armenian Early Iron Age contexts provide a first window into maternal lineages in the highlands between 1150 and 420 BCE. Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups observed include T2b (2 individuals), K (2), H (1), U3c (1) and U7a (1). These lineages are broadly distributed across West Eurasia and the greater Near East; for example, haplogroups T and K are common in many European and Near Eastern ancient and modern populations, while U7a and U3c are often associated with Near Eastern and Caucasus-related maternal ancestry. Archaeogenetic patterns therefore point to a maternal gene pool reflecting both local Caucasus continuity and long-range connections into the Near East.

Common Y-DNA haplogroups are not well characterized in this dataset: male-line markers were either not reported for these samples or remain limited in number, so conclusions about paternal ancestry and mobility are preliminary. With 14 samples, the dataset is informative but modest: it allows cautious inferences about maternal diversity, yet more genomes—especially high-coverage male genomes—are needed to resolve paternal lineages, admixture timings, and fine-scale population structure.

Taken together with archaeological context, these genetic signals support a picture of a highland population rooted in local Bronze Age ancestry while engaging in persistent contact with neighboring regions. Ongoing sampling will refine this emerging genetic portrait.