Middle Islamic Rural Occupation at Kani Shaie in Iraqi Kurdistan

A wave of new fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan during the past decade offers the opportunity to study societies of the Islamic periods from an archaeological perspective. Unfortunately, our current understanding of ceramic typology and chronology in the region still hinges overwhelmingly on datasets fro...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Ahmad, Mustafa (Author) ; Renette, Steve (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: University of Chicago Press 2023
In: Bulletin of ASOR
Year: 2023, Volume: 389, Pages: 35-64
Further subjects:B ceramic typology
B Iraqi Kurdistan
B Islamic pottery
B rural settlement
B Middle Islamic
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:A wave of new fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan during the past decade offers the opportunity to study societies of the Islamic periods from an archaeological perspective. Unfortunately, our current understanding of ceramic typology and chronology in the region still hinges overwhelmingly on datasets from major urban centers and the long-standing analysis of the technological development of glazed wares. The material culture of rural communities, on the other hand, is poorly understood. This causes problems for the reconstruction of the social and economic history of Islamic-era societies, and for survey projects that aim to assess longue durée changes in settlement patterns based on chronological assessments of surface collections. This article presents a coherent corpus of Middle Islamic pottery retrieved from a series of large pits from the site of Kani Shaie in Sulaymaniyah Governorate, Iraqi Kurdistan. Given the small size of the site, the lack of contemporary settlement remains, and the nature of the ceramic assemblage, it is proposed that these pits were used to dump refuse by a small nomadic community or household that returned to the site for a number of years in the 11th-13th century c.e. This small dataset offers glimpses into the lifeways of people who inhabited the border zone between the urbanized lowlands of Mesopotamia and the Zagros Highlands.
ISSN:2769-3589
Contains:Enthalten in: Bulletin of ASOR
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1086/724059