Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EVERYDAYISLAM (Becoming Muslim: Cultural Change, Everyday Life and State Formation in early Islamic North Africa (600-1000))
Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2023-12-31
The Muslim conquests of North Africa in the 7th century transformed the everyday lives of communities. Between 800-1000, the region experienced a ‘Golden Age’, visible in the growth of cities, intensified exchange and the spread of new craft technologies and agricultural practices. New social-religious norms underpinned the development of a distinctly ‘Islamic cultural package’ marked by the spread of new aesthetics, public and private architecture and Muslim dietary practices. The study of early Islamic empires and states is dominated by historians, who are largely reliant on much later literary sources: as a result, our view is top-down and focused on the centres of caliphal power. Despite significant recent advances, much of our knowledge continues to reflect the experience of rulers and elites, rather than the bulk of the population living under Muslim rule.
EVERYDAYISLAM is gathering a new dataset to examine how people lived through Muslim rule in North Africa between 600-1000 CE, through new excavations in Morocco and Tunisia, high-resolution scientific analysis of artefacts and ecofacts, and analysis of legacy archaeological datasets and written sources. It takes a comparative approach to long-term changes in housing, agriculture, diet and technology in three key regions: 1) the central Medjerda valley in Tunisia, the famed granary of Roman and medieval Africa; 2) the fertile Sebou Basin in Morocco, at the centre of one of the earliest Islamic successor states; 3) the Saharan oasis belt of the Wadi Draa in Morocco, on the margins of settled life. The overall objective is to rewrite the history of Muslim rule and the Islamisation of daily life from the perspective of the communities living through this pivotal period.
EVERYDAYISLAM is gathering a new dataset to examine how people lived through Muslim rule in North Africa between 600-1000 CE, through new excavations in Morocco and Tunisia, high-resolution scientific analysis of artefacts and ecofacts, and analysis of legacy archaeological datasets and written sources. It takes a comparative approach to long-term changes in housing, agriculture, diet and technology in three key regions: 1) the central Medjerda valley in Tunisia, the famed granary of Roman and medieval Africa; 2) the fertile Sebou Basin in Morocco, at the centre of one of the earliest Islamic successor states; 3) the Saharan oasis belt of the Wadi Draa in Morocco, on the margins of settled life. The overall objective is to rewrite the history of Muslim rule and the Islamisation of daily life from the perspective of the communities living through this pivotal period.
Research in the field in five archaeological expeditions has focused on obtaining a historical sequence from excavation and survey and in establishing chronologies for ceramics, glass, metal and other finds.
In the Oued Sebou, we have conducted 14 weeks of excavations and finds analysis (2021, 2022, 2023) at the UNESCO site of Volubilis. Though the site is most well-known for its Roman remains, in the middle ages, the site, now called Walīla, took on a new importance as a Berber centre, the probable locale of an Umayyad or Abbasid garrison, and the capital of Idrīs I, the founder of one of the earliest Islamic states in Morocco and is an ideal locale to explore the processes of Islamic state foundation (Fenwick 2022).. Outside the walls, excavations have revealed a densely packed sequence of courtyard housing and workshops with vast amounts of early medieval coins, a glass intaglio and several glass weights all inscribed in Arabic. Inside the city walls, excavations have uncovered a sequence of simple houses associated with kilns used for manufacturing pottery and furnaces used for heating coin moulds and far less coins (Fentress et al. 2022). The results provide a unique glimpse into 8th-9th century Morocco and scientific analyses of faunal and botanical remains, micromorphology, chemical and scanning electron microscope analyses of glass, metal and crucibles, petrographical analysis of ceramic fabrics are well underway.
In the Wadi Draa, we have conducted 8 weeks of excavations (2021, 2022) in an area of relict oasis on the Bounou Plain including at a small settlement of the 7th-10th centuries CE and a large kasbah of the 9-14th centuries CE. Considerable progress has been made in understanding settlement, housing, oasis farming and copper production in the Medieval period and the project is well on the way to producing a uniquely detailed study for this part of the Sahara. We have published a paper (Fenwick et al. 2022) which overturns long-held assumptions that sedentarisation and intensive oasis agriculture in the NW Sahara was a wholly medieval phenomenon associated with the rise of trans-Saharan trade. Our results demonstrate that contrary to the prevailing model, oasis agriculture commenced between the 4th-8th centuries, well before the Arab conquest, activity accelerated in the 9th century when large-scale irrigation programmes were implemented, contemporary with the establishment of new Saharan trading entrepôts. Oasis expansion and an agricultural boom occurred in the 11th–13th centuries, coinciding with Almoravid and Almohad rule and the intensification of Saharan trade with West Africa.
We have also collated a georeferenced database of urban sites in late antique and medieval North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya) which now contains about 750 sites and information on chronology and the presence of fortifications and religious buildings (churches, mosques, synagogues) derived from archaeological reports and gazetteers.
In the first 30 months of the project, 19 papers relating to the project have been given by team members in workshops, research seminars and international conferences in 7 countries; 5 articles have already been published on our preliminary results, and training in excavation methods has been provided to 12 Moroccan and 10 European students.
In the Oued Sebou, we have conducted 14 weeks of excavations and finds analysis (2021, 2022, 2023) at the UNESCO site of Volubilis. Though the site is most well-known for its Roman remains, in the middle ages, the site, now called Walīla, took on a new importance as a Berber centre, the probable locale of an Umayyad or Abbasid garrison, and the capital of Idrīs I, the founder of one of the earliest Islamic states in Morocco and is an ideal locale to explore the processes of Islamic state foundation (Fenwick 2022).. Outside the walls, excavations have revealed a densely packed sequence of courtyard housing and workshops with vast amounts of early medieval coins, a glass intaglio and several glass weights all inscribed in Arabic. Inside the city walls, excavations have uncovered a sequence of simple houses associated with kilns used for manufacturing pottery and furnaces used for heating coin moulds and far less coins (Fentress et al. 2022). The results provide a unique glimpse into 8th-9th century Morocco and scientific analyses of faunal and botanical remains, micromorphology, chemical and scanning electron microscope analyses of glass, metal and crucibles, petrographical analysis of ceramic fabrics are well underway.
In the Wadi Draa, we have conducted 8 weeks of excavations (2021, 2022) in an area of relict oasis on the Bounou Plain including at a small settlement of the 7th-10th centuries CE and a large kasbah of the 9-14th centuries CE. Considerable progress has been made in understanding settlement, housing, oasis farming and copper production in the Medieval period and the project is well on the way to producing a uniquely detailed study for this part of the Sahara. We have published a paper (Fenwick et al. 2022) which overturns long-held assumptions that sedentarisation and intensive oasis agriculture in the NW Sahara was a wholly medieval phenomenon associated with the rise of trans-Saharan trade. Our results demonstrate that contrary to the prevailing model, oasis agriculture commenced between the 4th-8th centuries, well before the Arab conquest, activity accelerated in the 9th century when large-scale irrigation programmes were implemented, contemporary with the establishment of new Saharan trading entrepôts. Oasis expansion and an agricultural boom occurred in the 11th–13th centuries, coinciding with Almoravid and Almohad rule and the intensification of Saharan trade with West Africa.
We have also collated a georeferenced database of urban sites in late antique and medieval North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya) which now contains about 750 sites and information on chronology and the presence of fortifications and religious buildings (churches, mosques, synagogues) derived from archaeological reports and gazetteers.
In the first 30 months of the project, 19 papers relating to the project have been given by team members in workshops, research seminars and international conferences in 7 countries; 5 articles have already been published on our preliminary results, and training in excavation methods has been provided to 12 Moroccan and 10 European students.
The results achieved to date mark a significant step forward for our understanding of the early Islamic world. The project has already generated a substantial new dataset of primary material evidence for a poorly documented and frequently neglected period in North African history. Excavations and scientific analyses are ongoing in Morocco and will soon commence in Tunisia. chemical and macroscopic analyses of medieval glass, metals and ceramics are producing new data on technology and provenancing of raw materials, while environmental and biomolecular analyses of artefacts and ecofacts will reveal what people were exploiting, producing and consuming in their houses. Results expected by the end of the project include a detailed understanding of settlement, agriculture, diet and technology in early medieval North Africa in three regions with very different political, social, ethnic and environmental histories. This will provide the basic material to compare how different communities experienced everyday life in early Islamic North Africa under Muslim rule - the main objective of the project.