The aim of the project is to elucidate the dynamics that shaped the Bukhara Oasis in the pre-Islamic era, spanning the period from the 4th/3rd century BC to the 8th century AD. The Bukhara Oasis is a unique and invaluable case study of an oasis system that developed in historical times (after the 4th century BC), when the former marshland gradually dried up, leaving space for cultivable land in the oasis. Its development can be followed through all these centuries, when the oasis gradually became one of the most important hubs within the Silk Roads network and an important regional polity in the area. The Bukhara Oasis is therefore a key cross section of the long first millennium, through which research will analyse the development of a Central Asian oasis system and disentangle the interwoven influences of long-term interactions between the dynamics of neighbouring empires or political formations and the local and regional dynamics of the oasis, node of the wider network of the Silk Roads. Finally, it is in this context that we can understand the human response to these political, cultural and socio-economic dynamics and how these entanglements helped to shape the material worlds of local communities.

However, its early phases, before the oasis was integrated into the late Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphates between the 8th and 9th centuries AD, are poorly documented. The latter consists mostly of sources from outside Central Asia that refer to neighbouring empires and regional political formations, and completely overlook the Bukhara Oasis, its population, and the political, social, cultural, and economic dynamics of a given period. The gradual emergence of Bukhara as a historical landscape since the 4th/3rd centuries BC and its history must be based on the evidence of material culture.

This data-driven project aims to gain insight into the everyday lives of oasis dwellers, the agencies of everyday objects in the practices of ordinary people, and how these entanglements between people and things were affected by major Central Asian dynamics and historical events. With an analytical approach that incorporates an archaeological-historical perspective, this study will ultimately provide a long-term 'material history' of everyday life in the oasis that looks behind and beyond conventional historical accounts. To achieve these results, the research will focus on ceramics as an excellent material marker, abundant in archaeological excavations, and analyse this dataset within its assemblages and archaeological contexts. The data will come from the unpublished assemblages found during the activities of the "Mission Archéologique Franco-Ouzbèke dans l'Oasis de Boukhara du Musée du Louvre" (MAFOUB), as well as from a comparative study of the archaeological literature, and will be analysed using the research tools developed in current material culture studies and archaeological theories.