SCIENCE & TECH: Drone Reveals Shockingly Huge Size of 3,000-Year-Old Caucasus Settlement

There is a 3,000-year-old fortified settlement on a high plateau in the southern Caucasus Mountains known as Dmanisis Gore. Located within the borders of the Republic of Georgia, Dmanisis Gore has long been considered an important Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age settlement, one of the first of its kind in this part of Eurasia.

But until just recently, some of the most fascinating facts about Dmanisis Gore remained unknown From ground level archaeologists could tell it was large, but a recent archaeological study carried out using drone mapping has revealed that this fortress is far bigger than previously realized. This discovery is so surprising that it is causing archaeologists and historians to rethink everything they thought they knew about settlement patterns in the Caucasus region at the turn of the first millennium BC.

“High-resolution UAV-based aerial survey of Dmanisis Gora reveals the extent of the large outer fortification system and settlement, which has few documented parallels in the region,” the study authors wrote in an article about their research published in Antiquity. “If the occupation of the inner fortress and outer settlement were roughly contemporary, as we suggest, this settlement would be one of the largest known in the South Caucasus Late Bronze and Iron Age.”