Tsutskhvati Caves

Tsutskhvati is the most complicated cave system in Georgia, and it is not a show cave. It lies in Tkibuli municipality near the village of Tsutskhvati, in the Okriba-Argveti ridge, cut into the wall of the Chishura gorge at about 320 metres.

Water has hollowed thirteen storeys out of the limestone — galleries stacked one above another, each formed when the river stood at a different level. The upper floors are dry; water still runs through the lowest. The second floor is the exceptional one: a natural tunnel two hundred metres long, ten to thirty metres wide and up to twenty-eight metres high. It is also the easiest part to enter.

The archaeology runs from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age. Excavation has produced Neanderthal material of roughly fifty thousand years ago, evidence of modern humans between eighty thousand and twelve thousand years ago, and stone tools reaching back as far as four hundred thousand years. Up to forty animal species have been identified in the bone assemblages. On the eleventh floor archaeologists found deliberately arranged bones and teeth of sacrificed animals. An international expedition has worked here since 2017.

What to expect: no lighting, no walkway, no handrail. This is a wild cave, and you need a torch, solid boots and preferably a local companion who knows the entrances. In exchange you get a silence and a sense of scale in the second-floor tunnel that no fitted-out cave will give you.

The bone deposits are the reason specialists keep coming back. Animal bone is abundant in the layers — up to forty species have been identified — and the sequence through the deposits records the climate swings of the Pleistocene. Almost none of that is visible to a visitor, but it explains why a cave with no lighting still has an archaeological camp beside it each summer.