Rock Pictures of Artvin Arılı (Demirkapı) Plateau
Oktay Özgül
Atatürk Üniversitesi, Edebiyat Fakültesi, Tarih Bölümü, Erzurum/TÜRKİYE
Keywords: Artvin, Arhavi, Rock Paintings, Caucasus, Central Asia, Nomadic Culture.
Abstract
Arılı Plateau / Demirkapı, which is one of the places where the plateau culture in the Eastern Black Sea region is intense, has an important rock painting area. The com- mon feature of the rock paintings we encountered also in Erzurum, Kars, Ardahan, Erzincan, Hakkâri, Ankara, Ordu and Izmir is that they provide data on the daily lives of nomadic cultures. In 2019, with the permission of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, we carried out studies in Artvin province, Arhavi district, near the Arılı Plateau, we undertook some reasearch on rock paintings at a site called Namazgah/ Demirkapı. Photography and drawing studies on rock paintings were exercised by our team. In the studies we carried out on rock paintings, it was understood that the paintings are related to nomadic cultures and their roots extend to Central Asia. In this study, rock paintings were promoted in the light of their analogues in Eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus and Central Asia.