Project description

Rural spaces are still a much-neglected field in the research on Sasanian and early Islamic empires. Historical studies to date regard rural areas primarily as hinterland organized from a central administration and run by landed gentry (the dehqans) to cater for urban centres, while recent scholarship on empires has increasingly emphasised the significance of landscapes, either through applying the concept of borderlands or through taking a long-durée perspective on human-environment interactions. Ultimately, these investigations favour a systems-centred view-point, though, that sees rural communities largely in a reactive role. Moreover, through their top-down approach, rural areas are characterised as passive resource at the disposition of imperial strategies.

The main hypothesis of this project is that rural spaces have their own agency and the study of rurality has a significant impact on how we perceive the economic functioning of borderlands in the Sasanian to early Islamic empires. To test this hypothesis, the following questions will be investigated:

How were rural sites organised in Sasanian and early Islamic borderlands and how did rural spaces function within a larger economic network?

The approach is based on the holistic analysis of freshly excavated ceramic assemblages and surface material from two case studies in exemplary Sasanian and early Islamic borderlands. These case studies are located in Iraqi Kurdistan and southern Uzbekistan, respectively. The analysis combines quantitative, anthropological and archaeometric methods as well as aspects of material culture studies to examine patterns of pottery production, circulation, procurement and consumption.