Visualizing Ancestral Landscapes: A Cognitive Approach to Kura-Araxes Necropolises in the Southern Caucasus

Nomadic groups shape their landscapes as they move across them to procure their daily livelihood (economic landscapes). Natural landscapes, in turn, form mythologies and the cognitive worlds of human societies through their sensory experience (symbolic or cosmological-religious landscapes). The aim of this paper is to investigate how this mutual relationship is materialized in the construction of funerary spaces that embed ancestral memory within natural visualscapes (ancestral landscapes). These phenomenological-cognitive premises will be tested using as a case study the Kura-Araxes period funerary landscape of the Şadılı-Uzun Rama plateau in Western Azerbaijan. In particular, I will assess the potential of spatial and visual analyses as tools to explore the possibility to reconstruct the reasons behind the choice made by the nomadic groups of the late fourth millennium BCE to locate a cemetery area in this specific southern Caucasian context.