Within the Aşvan Project we are concerned with the examination of the presentday architecture of the region, and utilizing this as a basic framework of reference, to investigate any areas of relevance, implication and relationship it may have to the stated objectives of the project.

As much of our work to date has been of a preliminary and exploratory nature, with our collected data still at a very basic and fragmented level, we have had to limit this paper to a very general synopsis of the various aspects of our work within the project.

Our paper consists of four main sections:

1. Outline of conceptual and methodological approach.

2. General appraisal of architecture within the region.

3. Preliminary appraisal of Aşvan village.

4. Summary of archaeological relevance.

The project objectives are concerned with the investigation of Man's activities, with particular reference to subsistence economy systems within the Aşvan region.

The study lasted two months during the summer of 1972 (19th July–14th September) and was approached by means of three techniques:

1. participant observation;

2. observation;

3. interviews.

The first consists in the researcher entering the household, establishing contact with the family, and then studying the everyday life by direct observation and participation in the activities. This technique allows freer access to the household than would normally be possible utilizing other techniques, and thus facilitates the collection of detailed data. This technique was applied to one household (referred to as the “study household”) in the village. Although data were collected on many aspects of daily life, special emphasis was placed on obtaining information about those activities which it was felt would have some relevance to archaeological problems in general.

The second approach involves general observations of the village women at work, and in particular, observations of five other village households with which other members of the project co-operated.

The third approach involved questioning the “study household” and the other five on general topics, such as the length of time taken to perform certain activities.

The reason for the drawing and recording of agricultural tools in the Aşvan bölgesi is partly to study the objects themselves, but mainly to examine the relationship between the tools and the activities for which they were designed and to consider various other features of man/environment interaction which they represent. The significance of agricultural tools in terms of human activities is such that their study forms a necessary component of the baseline situation under study in the Aşvan project (see earlier papers in this volume). This significance holds both for the present situation and also can be extrapolated into the archaeological past.

The agricultural tools, as recorded, range in type from the more generalized to highly specialized. The specialized may be used in only one activity, but these individual activities can only exist as part of an established agricultural system; any archaeological evidence of the corresponding tools forms ideal evidence for the past agricultural systems. For example, ploughs and threshing sleds are for ploughing and threshing only, but both activities need draught animals; threshing relates to cereal agriculture, and so on. Less specialized tool types may reflect less closely inter-connected activities; reaping knives for example, represent reaping of all kinds of crops, weeding, clearing of fallow land and cutting of scrub for fodder or firewood; any interpretation of reaping knives in archaeological context must allow for this diversity of usage.

Reports on animal bones from archaeological sites often include information about the “kill-off pattern” for each species – i.e. the relative representation of different age-groups in the sample. Osteologists believe that this information can be used as evidence for whether an animal was wild or domesticated, and, if domesticated, about the way in which man managed the animal. In this paper a method is described for recording such data for sheep and goat using mandibles and mandibular teeth; the analysis and interpretation of such data is discussed using excavated samples from Aşvan Kale.

When people keep sheep or goats, the age at which the animals are slaughtered depends on a range of factors: on the relative value placed on the different products, on the characteristics of the stock, and on a range of environmental factors – in particular, seasonal variation in the availability of grazing and feed. If meat production is the aim, most of the young males are killed when they reach the optimum point in weight-gain, only a few being kept for breeding.