Malakhat N. Faradzheva

Gobustan National Historical Park, Baku, Azerbaijan (malahat@mail.ru)

Key words: Gobustan, mountains Boyukdash, Kichikdash, the settlement Firuz, Kyaniza, Gaya aryasy, Ana zaga, petroglyphs, Stone Age.

Gobustan is a geographical region in the south-eastern part of the Azerbaijan Republic, was inscribed in the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List in 2007 as a Rock Art Cultural Landscape. At present more than 6000 petroglyphs and 40 burial mounds, about 20 caves-shelters, ancient settlements and burials were registered as well as 105000 items of material culture were analyzed in Gobustan. Petroglyphs differ with the variety of themes, originality of the plots and certain artistic skill. Final results of the research allow us to consider the chronology of petroglyphs of Azerbaijan in a different light. One of the last AMS dating showed that the most ancient site (Gaya aryasy cave-shelter) is dated back to 14500 BP. The uniqueness of the Gobustan is that there are petroglyphs dated to the period of the end of the Higher Paleolithic Age to the second half of the 20th c. The facts given in the article allow us to understand and imagine better the picture of cultural-historical process of this region in the course of millennia.