Was the prehistoric man an Azeri nationalist?: Mobilized prehistory and nation-building in Azerbaijan

Gobustan, a prehistoric site 60 km south of Baku, has an impressive collection of rock carvings from different prehistoric eras. Near the site, a national museum presents the prehistoric findings in a narrative that connects them with modern-day Azerbaijan, calling the hunter–gatherer tribes that lived in Gobustan ‘our ancient Azerbaijani ancestors’. While many nation-building projects dig deep into the past, reconstruct it, claim ancient civilizations as their own and sometimes even invent historical narratives that never happened, the Gobustan Museum and the narrative it implies (that prehistoric people living in 15,000 BCE were Azerbaijanis) seems like ‘overkill’, an exaggerated effort to connect the past and the present. The data from the museum points to a larger story: the construction of national identity and collective memory in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. This paper presents some of the author’s anthropological field research findings in the museum and explains why the narrative of ‘ancientness’ is so essential in post-Soviet Azerbaijan.