Shengavit Settlement

Shengavit Settlement is the site that gives its name to the archaeological record of the whole region. This Early Bronze Age town, occupied through radiocarbon-dated phases from around 3000 to 2500 BC, is the type site for the Kura-Araxes culture — an Early Transcaucasian Bronze Age tradition spread across the South Caucasus. Its pottery is the reference material archaeologists use to identify that culture everywhere else it turns up.

The town covered six hectares. A stone wall 4 meters thick ringed it. Grain surplus and active metalworking turned up in the excavations, evidence this was a hub, not a farming hamlet — the kind of place smaller communities depended on. Three satellite villages, Moukhannat Tepe, Khorumbulagh, and Tairov, sat just outside the walls, forming a small cluster around the main settlement. After the main occupation ended around 2500 BC, people came back irregularly for centuries more, using the site on and off until about 2200 BC.

The name itself is borrowed. It comes from a medieval village called Shengavit that once stood here; nobody knows what the Bronze Age inhabitants called their own town.

What you'll find today is a hill on the edge of Yerevan Lake, within the city, with excavated remains rather than a reconstructed town. It's a quiet, low-key stop — worth it if Bronze Age archaeology interests you, not a dramatic ruin to build a day around.

The site sits inside Yerevan, in the south-western part of the city near Yerevan Lake, roughly 4 km southwest of Republic Square as the crow flies.