What Lies Beneath Metsamor? 1,400 Years of History in a Single Tomb

A Roman coin bearing the image of Emperor Augustus has become the latest archaeological find to emerge from the ground at Metsamor in Armenia.

On its own, it is an intriguing discovery. Augustus was Rome’s first emperor, ruling from 27 BC until AD 14, at a time when Armenia occupied an important position between the Roman and Parthian worlds. Finding his image here provides another small piece of evidence of Armenia’s connections with the wider ancient world. But the archaeologists at Metsamor didn’t stop at the Roman layer.

As they continued excavating the burial chamber, they encountered an Iron Age burial. Further down came another, preliminarily dated to the 14th–13th centuries BC. Among the objects discovered were pottery, bronze artefacts, bell-shaped pendants, a bronze dagger and horse remains.

Within a single burial complex, more than a thousand years of history had emerged from the earth.

It is the kind of discovery that makes you look at Armenia’s landscape a little differently.

Travellers understandably associate the country with its monasteries. Geghard, Tatev, Noravank and Haghpat tell an extraordinary story stretching back through Armenia’s Christian history. But by the time many of those monasteries were built, people had already been living, farming, trading, making wine and working metal across this landscape for thousands of years.

Metsamor is a particularly good place to understand that scale.

Situated in the Ararat Valley, the settlement developed into an important centre of craftsmanship and metalworking, surrounded by an extensive necropolis. Excavations have produced pottery, jewellery, weapons, tools and thousands of other objects spanning different periods of occupation.

And the latest discovery is unlikely to be the last.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Armenia’s archaeology is how close some of it is to everyday life.

Take Shengavit.

Today, Shengavit is a busy district of Yerevan. Cars pass nearby, apartment buildings form part of the surrounding city and the centre of the capital is only a short drive away.

Yet on a hill beside the Hrazdan River are the remains of a settlement that flourished during the Early Bronze Age, from the fourth into the third millennium BC.

Shengavit was no tiny collection of primitive huts. The six-hectare settlement was fortified, with stone walls and an underground passage leading towards the river. Archaeologists have uncovered interconnected round and rectangular dwellings, narrow streets, storage areas and evidence of agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy, craft production and ritual life.

The site became so important to archaeologists that the wider Early Bronze Age culture found across the Armenian Highlands and neighbouring regions is often referred to as the Shengavit or Kura-Araxes culture.

In other words, you don’t necessarily need to travel into remote mountains to find ancient Armenia. Sometimes it is underneath modern Yerevan.

Then there is Areni-1.

Anyone who travels through Vayots Dzor today will quickly realise that wine remains an important part of the region. Vineyards cover parts of the valley, Areni grapes appear on wine lists across the country and small wineries sit alongside a growing generation of Armenian producers.

What makes this particularly remarkable is that people were making wine here more than six millennia ago.

Inside Areni-1 Cave, archaeologists uncovered what is considered the world’s oldest known complete winemaking installation, dating to around 4100 BC. They found a grape press, fermentation vessels, storage jars, grape remains and drinking cups. The cave also produced another extraordinary object: a leather shoe more than 5,000 years old.

It means that when you sit down for a glass of Areni wine in Vayots Dzor today, you are drinking it in a landscape where winemaking stretches back thousands of years. That is a fairly difficult sense of place to manufacture.

At Agarak, on the southern slopes of Mount Aragats, the archaeology becomes stranger still.

Here, an enormous landscape of volcanic rock was shaped by the people who lived there. Basins, channels, platforms and other features were carved directly into the stone across a site extending over more than 100 hectares.

Excavations have revealed evidence from multiple periods, including the Early Bronze Age and later Classical occupation. Its position along routes through the Aras Valley also connected Agarak to a much wider world of movement and trade.

It is one of those places where the distinction between archaeological site and landscape almost disappears. Rather than walking around a single fortress or monument, you are moving through terrain that people were altering and inhabiting thousands of years ago.

And then there is Yerevan itself.

Shengavit takes the city’s story back into the Early Bronze Age, but several other archaeological sites reveal what happened here much later.

At Erebuni, an inscription records the establishment of a fortress by the Urartian king Argishti I in 782 BC. That inscription is sometimes described as Yerevan’s “birth certificate”, providing the modern capital with an unusually precise connection to its ancient predecessor.

Across the city at Karmir Blur lie the remains of Teishebaini, another major Urartian centre established in the seventh century BC. Archaeologists there have uncovered fortifications, storerooms, cuneiform tablets and evidence of large-scale wine and grain storage.

Together, Erebuni, Karmir Blur and Shengavit make Yerevan itself an archaeological destination. You can move across one modern city and encounter evidence of communities separated by thousands of years. UNESCO’s tentative listing for Yerevan’s Urartian heritage describes Erebuni and Karmir Blur as important evidence for understanding the urban, political and cultural development of one of the major civilisations of the ancient Near East.

These are only some of the better-known sites.

Around Lake Sevan, discoveries at Lchashen have transformed our understanding of Bronze Age life and burial traditions. Ancient Artashat was once one of Armenia’s great capitals and an important centre of the Hellenistic world. Dvin later developed into a major political and commercial city, while excavations continue at prehistoric and ancient sites across the country. Armenia’s Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography works on sites ranging from Palaeolithic caves and early farming settlements to Bronze Age societies and the cities and fortresses of the Kingdom of Van.

What makes all of this particularly interesting for a traveller is the proximity.

Armenia is compact enough that these different periods rarely feel geographically distant from one another. You can leave Yerevan in the morning, pass landscapes inhabited since prehistoric times, visit an ancient settlement or fortress, and have lunch in a village where many of the same crops that sustained communities here thousands of years ago are still being grown.

The archaeology isn’t always behind glass either. It remains part of the landscape.

That brings us back to the Roman coin at Metsamor.

Its precise minting date is still being studied, as are some of the other objects discovered during the latest excavation. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the find is not the coin itself.

It is what happened when archaeologists kept digging.

Roman Armenia gave way to the Iron Age. The Iron Age gave way to the Bronze Age. And a single burial complex became a physical timeline through more than a thousand years of human history.

That pattern repeats itself across Armenia.

A modern neighbourhood conceals a Bronze Age settlement. A wine region contains evidence of people making wine 6,100 years ago. A hill overlooking Yerevan preserves the inscription of a king who founded a fortress in 782 BC. And beneath the ground at Metsamor, archaeologists are still finding new pieces of the story.

Armenia’s history is often described as ancient.

Perhaps the more interesting thing is that we are still discovering just how ancient it is.

Walk through Armenia’s layers of history yourself. Visit Metsamor and the History Museum of Armenia on our Armenia Wine Tour, step inside the world’s oldest known winery on the Areni-1 Cave & Wine Experience, see the country’s headline sites on Best of Armenia in 8 Days, or explore the capital on the Armenia City Break: Yerevan, Garni & Lake Sevan. Read more on About Armenia.