Ազոխի քարանձավ

Azıx mağarası - Azokh Cave - Azykh Cave - Azıx Mağarası

Useful Information

Location:	Hadrut Province, Nagorno-Karabakh (39.619097, 46.988569)
Open:	closed. [2021]
Fee:	closed. [2021]
Classification:	Karst cave
Light:	electric
Dimension:
Guided tours:
Photography:	allowed
Accessibility:	no
Bibliography:	Yolanda Fernández-Jalvo, Tania King, et al (): The Azokh Cave complex: Middle Pleistocene to Holocene human occupation in the Caucasus J Hum Evol. 2010 Jan;58(1):103-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.07.005. Epub 2009 Nov 6., PMID: 19896700 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.07.005. pdf Yolanda Fernández-Jalvo, Tania King, Levon Yepiskoposyan, Peter Andrews (2016): Azokh Cave and the Transcaucasian Corridor, Springer International Publishing (Verlag), XVII, 349 Seiten 2016 \| 1st ed. 2016, ISBN 978-3-319-24922-3. online researchgate pdf
Address:	Azokh Cave.
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History

1960	discovered by the "Palaeolithic Archaeological Expedition" of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences.
1990s	excavations resumed.

Description

Ազոխի քարանձավ (Azokh Cave, Azykh Cave) is an archaeological excavation site located at the border It is named after the nearby village Azykh, which formerly had an Armenian-majority, hence the Armenian name Ազոխի քարանձավ. As it is located in Nagorno-Karabakh, it is actually located in a war area. Nagorno-Karabakh belongs to Azerbaijan, but with many Armenian inhabitants they fought a separatist war immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and again in 2020. In the time between the region was classified as an occupied territory, and the cave was protected by The Hague Convention 1954 and its two protocols on the Protection of Cultural Property during armed conflicts. As a result the cave is not really open to the public. We actually listed it only for its importance as an archaeological site.

Azokh Cave was discovered in 1960 by the Palaeolithic Archaeological Expedition of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences. This expedition was led by Mammadali Huseynov, an Azerbaijani and Soviet archaeologist. However, while the importance of the cave was obvious, during the 1960s excavation no taphonomic data was collected. As a result, the chronological sequence of the layers was unclear. The excavations were resumed in the mid 1990s, and in 2002 an international research team headed by Tania King discovered undisturbed sediments. This allowed dating of the levels.

The cave contains 10 levels, two of them have an internal stratification. The oldest is dated to 1.19 ±0.08 million years old, which makes the finds some of the earliest groups of proto-humans in Eurasia. They are similar to the Olduwan culture named after Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge. Also, a neanderthal-like jaw bone is assumed to be over 300,000 years old.

The cave has three entrances and was separated into six section which are often wrongly called "caves".