DAY 1, SESSION 4 – Ceramics Part One
Chair. Awet Teklehimanot Araya
Centre for Islamic Archaeology, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, UK
"Sacred Colors and Nomadic Design: The Hand Formed Slip Painted Pottery of the Medieval (8th – 12th c. CE) Central Asian Highlands"
ANN M. MERKLE: doctoral student at Washington University in St. Louis, USA
This proposed paper addresses how social identity, as reflected in networks represented through pottery decoration, served as a means of mediating and buffering against the social and political uncertainties generated by shifting political and religious landscapes of medieval Central Asia. My project examines the decoration and distribution of hand formed slip painted pottery (HSP), a type that spans medieval Central Asian highland and lowland urban sites, to understand how these objects may reflect social identity construction or continuity across different social and geographic environments. I use the medieval site of Tashbulak (TBK), located in the highlands of southeastern Uzbekistan as a case study, due to the unusually high concentration of HSP found at the site. Occupied from ~700–1000 CE, the site is interpreted as a settlement and political center of peoples who are associated by chronology and material culture with the Qarakhanids (~900–1200 CE), who brought a change from Persianate and pan-religious culture to a Turkic Muslim one. The unusual distribution of HSP at Tashbulak suggests that either the occupants were recent migrants into the region, moving with the spread of the Qarakhanids, or that they were an indigenous community who found themselves adapting to the increased spread of Turkic Muslim tribespeople from the northeast. I measure decorative and formal diversity of HSP and its prevalence through an analysis of decorative variables recorded from pottery excavated at TBK. By comparing these two types of diversity, I will test how this variation informs us about life at TBK, and about regional variation of social identities across highland Central Asia in the medieval period.
Keywords: Social identity, pottery decoration, medieval Tashbulak, Uzbekistan
#GIAS #IslamicArchaeology #Archaeology #ExeterIAIS #Ceramics #Medieval #Identity #Nomad