SEMI-CIRCULAR BELT BUCKLES IN THE COLHIAN BRONZE CULTURE (ARCHAELOGICAL ATLAS: TYPOLOGY, SPECIAL DISTRIBUTION, CHRONOLOGY, AND CULTURAL GENESIS)

Abstract

Semicircular buckles are one of the most prominent artifacts of the Colchian Bronze Age (the so-called “Colchian-Kobanian Bronze Age”), which are important to be determined according to their typology, area, chronology, and genesis in order to resolve debatable issues of the archaeological cultures of the Caucasus.
Semicircular buckles, whose distribution is determined by the area of the Colchian Bronze Culture, are divided into two groups and 15 types. Chronologically, the buckles of group I date back to the first quarter of the 1st millennium BC, while the buckles of group II, more generally, to the first half of the 1st millennium BC. One theory links the genesis of these objects to mountain Colchis with the similar method of making semicircular awls and rectangular buckles, as well as the mold found in mountainous Colchis (Lechkhumi, Tskheti settlement), into which a meandering swastika-shaped inlay material (glass or metal?) was cast. In turn, the mentioned region is considered one of the centers of the origin of Colchis copper metallurgy.