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Review Article

Islamic archaeology at a difficult age

Jeremy Johns
Art and Archaeology of the Islamic Mediterranean
The Khalili Research Centre
University of Oxford
Oxford OX1 2LG, UK
(Email: jeremy.johns@orinst.ox.ac.uk)

Islamic archaeology, unlike the archaeology of medieval Christendom, is still struggling to establish itself as a mature and independent subject. It is not just that some excavators hurry through Islamic strata, if they do not actually discard them, in search of the real treasures buried beneath. No less damaging are the internal divisions that separate the different branches of Islamic history. Few archaeologists or art historians possess the linguistic skills necessary to use primary written sources to study the material culture of Islamic societies, and many historians remain contemptuous or at best suspicious of material evidence. But that division is as nothing to the chasm that separates the archaeologists from the art historians. Towards the end of the last century, one leading historian of Islamic art delivered in a major series of public lectures one devoted to Islamic archaeology, the purpose of which, he declared, was to find new works of art for him and his colleagues to study. A few years earlier, one of the foremost archaeologists of Islam had deliberately subjected an international audience of specialists — art historians, museum curators and even collectors and dealers — in the art and architecture of the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt in the tenth to twelfth centuries to a punitive sherd-by-sherd analysis of undecorated, unglazed coarsewares from a minor provincial site on the furthest periphery of the Fatimid world. In his new introduction to Islamic archaeology published in Edinburgh's excellent New Islamic Surveys, Marcus Milwright mildly protests that the main role of archaeology is 'as a complementary discipline contributing to a more nuanced picture of the Islamic past' (p. 195) and that the best way forward lies through 'a fuller dialogue with other historical disciplines' (p. 197). The three other books reviewed in this article demonstrate the validity of these gentle pleas for harmony in very different regions of the Islamic world — the Iberian peninsula, the city of Jerusalem, and the port of Siraf in southern Iran.

What is Islamic archaeology?

Milwright is an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Victoria in Canada, who uses both material and written evidence in his own research, and is both an experienced field archaeologist and a respected historian of Islamic art and architecture. While general surveys of Islamic history and of Islamic art and architecture are common, Milwright's introductory survey is the first of its kind — for the moment, I ignore the polemical essay by Tim Insoll (1999.) Why this should be so is not immediately obvious. The geographical and temporal range of the world of Islam is far greater than that of the Roman empire, and its sites and artefacts are as spectacular, its big questions as compelling, as any rehearsed in countless introductions to Roman archaeology. And while Rome was once incontrovertibly our past and Islam counterpoised as the exotic and threatening other, the extent to which this is ceasing to be true is a pitch that would help sell any glossy and well-designed introduction to Islamic archaeology. It is true that there is significantly less Islamic archaeology published than Roman, and that the quality of what is published tends to be more variable but, as Milwright clearly demonstrates, there is more than enough material of sufficient quality to fill an introductory survey. The absence may in part be explained by the publishers' ignorance of the gap that separates archaeology from art history, and wrongly see the numerous surveys of Islamic art and architecture as satisfying the market. All credit, then, to Edinburgh for perceiving the need for a general survey of Islamic archaeology. But why did they choose to publish it in this small format with few black-and-white figures grouped together outside the text? In addition to the New Islamic Surveys, Edinburgh publish highly respected and commercially successful surveys of Islamic art and architecture in comparatively large format with abundant monochrome and colour illustrations within the text. Had Milwright's introduction to Islamic archaeology benefited from similarly lavish production it would not only have permitted the author to survey the field more effectively but would also have ensured that the volume reached a wider audience.

What is Islamic archaeology? In the first chapter, Milwright takes the practical and sensible position that it is not the archaeology of a religion but rather the study of 'aspects of the past in regions where the ruling elite has professed the faith of Islam ... [and] addresses things that are made and used by Muslim and non-Muslim communities within these historically defined regions and periods' (p. 6). I could quibble — what about the material culture of Muslims living under the rule of non-Muslims? — but this broad definition serves as a useful counterweight to the idea that the religion of Islam represents a 'structuring code' (the words are Insoll's, but the idea will resurface below when I come to discuss Islamic al-Andalus) that produces a distinctively Islamic material culture. Milwright briskly defends his flexible and pragmatic stance and ends by confessing his positivist creed that interpretations should evolve from the evidence (pp. 6-8). He might have added that a chief virtue of his approach is that it does not rely upon decrypting the 'structuring code' that identifies the Muslim other in the archaeological record, but rather includes Muslims within the messy, contingent world of things occupied by the rest of us. The idea that past Muslims left a unique material record, and its corollary that any one who did not do so was not a Muslim, would meet the solemn approval of certain Islamist scholars — as good a reason as any to reject it as the premise for research. In the end, the term 'Islamic archaeology' is nothing but a chronological and geographical label that implies little or nothing about either the material studied or the method used.

After the introduction, in which he also sketches the history of Islamic archaeology, Milwright devotes two chapters to very big questions: what archaeology can tell us about the Arab conquests of the seventh and early eighth centuries and about the formation of Islamic societies in the early and classical period in the eighth to tenth centuries. This is familiar territory and Millwright surveys it with great assurance. In Chapter 2, 'Early Islam and late antiquity', he stresses continuity with the Byzantine and Sasanian past, leaving the discontinuities produced by the Arab conquests to speak for themselves. This can be successful, as it is in his discussion of what used to be called the 'desert palaces', the palatial country estates (qusur) built for the Umayyad caliphs in the Syrian steppe in the first half of the eighth century. But it does rather downplay what was undeniably the most significant political event in the history of Eurasia in the first millennium AD. On the one hand, he might have included a critical survey of the contribution that archaeology has to make to the lively debate about the reasons for the Arab conquests and their lasting success — climate change and other natural disasters, endemic plague, debilitating demographic and economic decline, the draining effect of almost constant war between Byzantium and Sasanian Iran, international trade in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, and of course the rise of the religion of Islam have all been proposed as factors that might explain the success of the early Arab conquests but none is here weighed in the archaeological balance. On the other hand, Milwright should have guided his readers through what for many Islamicists will be the unfamiliar literature on the extent to which the early Islamic world participated in the transition from Rome to the Middle Ages; no survey of the transition from late antiquity to early Islam can afford to ignore the ideas of Chris Wickham (2005 and key articles published in the mid 1980s) and the reactions of others to them. Chapter 3, surveying 'New directions in the early Islamic period' of the eighth to tenth century, deals with the expansion of trade in the Indian Ocean and with the north, and the new building types of the mosque and the ruler's palace (dar al-imara). Again, Milwright's touch is assured and confident. However, the most conspicuous developments of this period — the transformation of the countryside by the controversial early Islamic 'agricultural revolution' (Chapter 4), the hypertrophic growth of Islamic megalopolises in Iraq (Chapter 5), the archaeology of religious practices (Chapter 6), the development of new manufacturing industries (Chapter 7), and the dramatic expansion of trade within the Islamic world and beyond its borders (Chapter 8) — are all ably discussed in subsequent chapters, leaving Chapter 3 rather bereft. A glance at the 'post-medieval' Islamic world, taking in the impact of tobacco and coffee, the importation of glazed pottery into the Islamic world, and the archaeology of colonisation (Chapter 9), and a concluding summation of the state of the art which also looks forward to the future development of Islamic archaeology (Chapter 10), completes the survey. End matter includes a helpful glossary and list of dynasties and periods, and a substantial (but inevitably incomplete) bibliography.

Milwright's introduction is a sound, balanced and scrupulously fair review of the field that will be immensely useful to lecturers and students of Islamic archaeology. It is carefully written to be accessible to a general audience, and the material discussed is generally well chosen to illustrate the full range and current state of Islamic archaeology. It is no fault of the author that Edinburgh have missed the opportunity to publish his book in a more generous and visually attractive format.

al-Andalus

Despite its 'lunatic fringe' title, Boone's Lost civilization is a valuable essay upon the history of Islamic civilisation in the Iberian peninsula. Although it is written by an anthropologist, and draws upon archaeological evidence, it contributes primarily to a historiographical debate. The bones of this debate are set out lucidly in a first chapter that raises expectations largely met in the first half of the book before it rather loses its way as the author pursues his own enthusiasms and returns only episodically to its main themes. Since the fifteenth century, Iberian historians have stressed continuity with the Roman and Visigothic past, and thus 'lost' the intervening civilisation of Islamic al-Andalus. Moreover, that civilisation is to an arguable extent unique in that it fits within the historiographical tradition of neither western Europe nor the Middle East. Again, while it is probably the case that there is more Islamic archaeology carried out in Spain and Portugal than in any other region of the medieval Islamic world, with the exception of a few key sites, it is little studied even by specialist Islamic archaeologists. While French scholars of the Annales school played a major role in rediscovering the lost civilisation of Islamic al-Andalus, the most influential of them, Pierre Guichard (1973, trans. 1976), insisted that Islamic and Christian societies were arranged around fundamentally opposing mentalités manifested as principles of social organisation (to some extent equivalent to Insoll's 'structuring code'). Not only did this ensure that there was a minimum of acculturation between the Muslim invaders of al-Andalus and the indigenous Christian population, but also it held out the prospect that the two communities must each have left a distinctively different archaeological footprint. Both Guichard's model and subsequent efforts to support, modify and demolish it are clearly summarised by Boone (pp.16-19, 96-115). So too is the debate over the fate of the Christian community under Islamic rule, which relates to the wider controversy over the 'medieval transition' from late antiquity (pp. 19-25). Boone's discussion of the most important aspects of the archaeological contribution to these debates is also admirably clear and, crucially, summarises an extensive literature largely written in Castilian, Catalan, French and Portuguese. For example, Islamic al-Andalus saw the development of a system of castles surrounded by a rural hinterland settled in small villages — the so-called hisn/qarya (castle/village) complex — that looks very much like the feudal incastellamento of Christian Europe. But, because Guichard insisted that Muslim society was organised by tribe and not on feudal lines, he concluded that the castles of al-Andalus represented not feudal centres of control but rather fortified refuges collectively maintained by the tribe to which its members could retreat for protection from aggressors. The hisn/qarya model therefore became for Guichard and his followers an archaeological marker of tribal organisation and Muslim settlement. Boone nimbly picks holes in this structure, summarising both the arguments of historians and the archaeological evidence to raise questions about the contrast between feudalism and the Islamic tax-farm (iqta`) in a manner that will be accessible to students unable themselves to read the secondary literature (pp. 110-14). He also follows the leading Spanish historian, Eduardo Manzano Moreno (2006), in linking this debate to that over the nature of the medieval transition, again in a lucid manner that will be much appreciated by students. Boone is sometimes less persuasive when he comes to summarise his own research. His discussion of changes over time in the pattern of settlement around Mértola raises more questions than it answers and seems to have been over-hastily written (pp. 89-91), while his interpretation of a motley domestic collection of silver trinkets as evidence of tribal organisation is at best implausible (pp. 117-119). Although Boone generally moves with confidence within the field of Islamic studies, there are moments when he reveals that he is no Islamicist: the Shari`a is the body of rules and regulations governing the lives of Muslims, not 'religious scriptures' (p. 79); Ibn Hawqal was an Iraqi geographer, not the ruler of Sijilmassa (p. 83); and Malikism refers to one of the four schools of religious law within Sunni Islam, and was not a sectarian movement equivalent to Sunnism or Shi`ism (p. 137). Such carping aside, this is an immensely useful little book which will help to carry the archaeology of Islamic al-Andalus out into the mainstream where it belongs.

Jerusalem

Turning from the general to the particular, and to one of the key religious sites of Islam, Kay Prag has devotedly ensured that the excavations directed by Kathleen Kenyon in Jerusalem from 1961 to 1967 are published to the highest possible standard. The present volume covers the Hellenistic to Ottoman periods and, like the other four volumes in the series, is a model of what an archaeological report of a fifty year-old excavation should be. Prag has given to Islamic strata and their structures and artefacts no less attention than is paid to the Iron Age that was the main focus of Kenyon's excavations. The greater part of the volume is devoted to Sites G and J in, respectively, the northwest and southeast corners of Building II. The latter is the most complete of the four or five massive structures built for the Umayyad caliphs in the first half of the eighth century as part of a palatial complex to the south of the Mosque of al-Aqsa, below the Haram al-Sharif (Chapter 6, pp. 99-241). Kenyon excavated only a tiny fraction of the whole complex, which was subsequently cleared in 1968-70 by Benjamin Mazar and Meier Ben-Dov. While the Israeli excavations were far more extensive and comprehensive than Kenyon's, only preliminary reports have so far appeared, so that the present account is the only full publication of the excavation of one of the most significant sites of the early Islamic world. It is to be hoped that the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Exploration Society will soon fulfil their responsibility to publish in full their excavations of this uniquely important complex. In the meantime, the main contribution of Prag's meticulous analysis is to contradict Ben-Dov's conclusion that Building II was already abandoned before the mid eighth century and thereafter never reoccupied (Ben-Dov 1985, pp. 312, 319). Although no substantial primary occupation deposits were found by Kenyon's excavations within Building II, the drains used by the original structure produced significant quantities of ninth-century glazed wares, thus demonstrating that the building remained in use for at least a century after the fall of the Umayyad caliphate (pp. 157-8, 195-207). Were this to prove true for the rest of the palatial complex, it would carry significant implications for the history of Jerusalem under the Abbasid caliphs. The other site important for the history of Islamic Jerusalem excavated by Kenyon was a stretch of the Ottoman city wall lying to the east of the Umayyad palatial complex (Chapter 7, pp. 243-378). Kenyon had hypothesised that the Ottoman wall at this point followed the city wall of Roman Aelia or the earlier wall of the Camp of the Tenth Legion but her excavations established that the city wall here was built under the Ottoman sultan Sulaiman the Magnificent in 1537-1540/1. These two highlights can not do full justice to Prag's careful analysis of Kenyon's excavations, which revealed a wealth of detail for the archaeology of Islamic Jerusalem, much of which significantly modifies the standard account.

Siraf

The last book reviewed here is the prolegomenon to the publication of the excavations of the port city of Siraf in on the Gulf coast of Iran directed by David Whitehouse for the British Institute of Persian Studies in 1966-73. Numerous interim reports and studies of particular aspects of the site have been published in the journal Iran and elsewhere, and two fascicules of the final report have already appeared (Whitehouse 1980; Lowick 1985), but the bulk of the excavations remains to be published. The present volume gives a brief account of the excavations and surveys the written evidence for the city and its region, before moving on to give the fullest and most consistent account yet published of the urban topography of Siraf in the ninth and tenth centuries. With the volume comes a CD-ROM containing superb high-resolution copies of plans of Siraf produced by the surveys of 1967-71. Tony Wilkinson's account of the hinterland of the city focuses upon its water supply and cultivable lands (Chapter 4, pp. 54-76). Wilkinson suggests that, at its apogee in the ninth and tenth centuries, the fields and gardens of Siraf are likely to have supplied as little as 50 per cent of the city's needs, given the mountainous topography of the site. That the city continued to expand, occupying ancient cultivated land with impunity, attests both to the success of Siraf's maritime trade, and to the perilous extent of its dependence upon it. Don Whitcomb contributes an account of the brief regional survey of the high valleys behind Siraf undertaken in 1973 (Chapter 5, pp.77-97). Most of the sites identified date to the period 500-1500 and Whitcomb tentatively concludes that they depended for their existence upon the economic presence of Siraf. In a final chapter, David Whitehouse discusses the wider context of the port of Siraf in its two roles as an intermediary in the maritime trade that brought luxury commodities and manufactured goods from the Indian Ocean and the Far East to the Gulf and thence to the markets of western Asia, and as an entrepot supplying imported goods to Shiraz, Firuzabad and other cities of the Iranian plateau. In linking the apogee of Siraf to the rise of the Abbasid capital at Baghdad as the centre of a new 'world economy', Whitehouse returns to a subject made popular in the influential essay that he wrote with Richard Hodges (Hodges & Whitehouse 1983). No site on the Iranian shore of the Gulf approaching the importance of Siraf has yet been excavated and the British Institute for Persian Studies is to be congratulated on the appearance of this slim volume and exhorted to do what it can to ensure the comprehensive and final publication of its excavations at Siraf.

References

• BEN-DOV, M. 1985. In the shadow of the Temple: the discovery of ancient Jerusalem. New York: Harper & Row.
• GUICHARD, P. 1976. Al-Andalus: estructura antropológica de una sociedad islámica en Occidente (Spanish translation of Tribus arabes et berbères en Al-Andalus, first published 1973). Barcelona: Barral.
• HODGES, R. & WHITEHOUSE, D. 1983. Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the origins of Europe: archaeology and the Pirenne thesis. London: Duckworth.
• INSOLL, T. 1999. The archaeology of Islam. Oxford: Blackwell.
• LOWICK, N.M. 1985. Siraf XV. The coins and monumental inscriptions. London: British Institute of Persian Studies.
• MANZANO MORENO, E. 2006. Conquistadores, emires y califas: los Omeyas y la formación de Al-Andalus. Barcelona: Crítica.
• WHITEHOUSE, D. 1980. Siraf III. The congregational mosque and other mosques from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. London: British Institute of Persian Studies.
• WICKHAM, C. 2005. Framing the early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400-800. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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