Journal of Islamic Archaeology (JIA)
Editor: Bethany J. Walker
The Journal of Islamic Archaeology is the only journal today devoted to the field of Islamic archaeology on a global scale. In the context of this journal, "Islamic archaeology" refers neither to a specific time period nor to a particular geographical region, as Islam is global and the center of the "Islamic world" has shifted many times over the centuries. Likewise, it is not defined by a single methodology or theoretical construct (for example; it is not the "Islamic" equivalent of "Biblical archaeology", with an emphasis on the study of places and peoples mentioned in religious texts). The term refers to the archaeological study of Islamic societies, polities, and communities, wherever they are found. It may be considered a type of "historical" archaeology, in which the study of historically (textually) known societies can be studied through a combination of "texts and tell".
Monographs in Islamic Archaeology
Editors: Bethany J. Walker and Asa Eger
Monographs in Islamic Archaeology is a series dedicated to the promotion of innovative and state-of-the-art scholarship on Islamic societies, polities, and communities, from an archaeological perspective. The volumes are problem-oriented, data-rich, theoretically sound, and methodologically innovative studies of archaeological sites and corpuses. The range of studies span the Islamic periods (7th century CE until today) and represents the Islamic world on its global scale.
Life on the Farm in Late Medieval Jerusalem The Village of Beit Mazmil, its Occupants and Their Industry over Five Centuries
Editor: Bethany J. Walker
Studies of Jerusalem in the post-classical periods have traditionally centered, unsurprisingly, on the Old City, isolating it from the regional setting in which it operated on a daily basis. The agricultural hinterland of Jerusalem – comprising a network of smaller settlements, agricultural terraces, fields, cisterns, watch towers, and local marketplaces that together fed the city – have not been a focus of archaeological research until very recently.
Life on the Farm in Late Medieval Jerusalem offers a rare glimpse into the daily life of a single rural household and its intimate, but ever-evolving, relationship with Jerusalem from the 14th through the early 20th centuries. It does so through a tightly integrated, multi-disciplinary study of one astonishingly well-preserved farmstead in its agricultural setting, how both settlement and farmland developed together over time, and how these changes impacted the socio-economic development of Jerusalem during the Mamluk and Ottoman Sultanates. The life history of this place is thus written on the basis of archaeological, botanical, and geological data, all interpreted against a rich textual record of land sales, field development, conflict, and cooperation.
History and Society during the Mamluk Period (1250–1517): Studies of the Annemarie Schimmel Institute for Advanced Study III
Editors: Bethany J. Walker and Abdelkader Al Ghouz
This volume is a collection of research essays submitted by fellows of the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg, an Advanced Center of Research in Mamluk Studies. It covers three themes, which correspond to the research agenda of the final three academic years of the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg. These were: environmental history, material culture studies, and im/mobility. The aim of the contributions is to overcome the disciplinary boundaries of the field and to engage in scholarly debates in Ottoman Studies, European history, archae-ology and art history, and even the natural sciences.
Living with Nature and Things: Contributions to a New Social History of the Middle Islamic Periods
Editors: Bethany J. Walker and Abdelkader Al Ghouz
This edited volume represents the research results of two international conferences organized and sponsored by the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg: "Environmental Approaches in Pre-Modern Middle Eastern Studies" and "Material Culture Methods in the Middle Islamic Periods". The following work consists of three parts, which correspond to the themes of the aforementioned conferences (Contributions to Environmental History and Material Culture Studies) and a third which bridges the gap between the two approaches (Practice and Knowledge Transfer). The present contributions cover a wide range of such topics as urban pollution, local perceptions of weather, rural estate economy, Sufi understandings of nature and the body and mind, houses and socialization, text and gardens, local know-how and interdependence in medieval Syrian agriculture, crop selection, and the medieval agricultural economy.
The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology
Editors: Bethany J. Walker, Timothy Insoll, Corisande Fenwick.
Born from the fields of Islamic art and architectural history, the archaeological study of the Islamic societies is a relatively young discipline. With its roots in the colonial periods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its rapid development since the 1980s warrants a reevaluation of where the field stands today. This Handbook represents for the first time a survey of Islamic archaeology on a global scale, describing its disciplinary development and offering candid critiques of the state of the field today in the Central Islamic Lands, the Islamic West, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The international contributors to the volume address such themes as the timing and process of Islamization, the problems of periodization and regionalism in material culture, cities and countryside, cultural hybridity, cultural and religious diversity, natural resource management, international trade in the later historical periods, and migration. Critical assessments of the ways in which archaeologists today engage with Islamic cultural heritage and local communities closes the volume, highlighting the ethical issues related to studying living cultures and religions.
Jordan in the Late Middle Ages: Transformation of the Mamluk Frontier
Author: Bethany Walker
The decline of the Mamluk Sultanate from the late fourteenth century is an important component of the larger transformation of the late medieval Levant. In this centralized state, the Mamluks political culture has traditionally been defined by that of the imperial capital of Cairo. The political decline of the sultanate in Cairo has, then, come to define the many-faceted transformations of the entire region with the waning of the medieval era. The dynamics of change far from Cairo, in remote settlements on the imperial frontier, are, by contrast, relatively unknown. This book explores the transformation of the Mamluk state from the perspective of the Jordanian frontier, considering the actions of local people in molding both the state and their own societies in the post-plague era. Through a critical analysis of a wide range of economic and legal documents of the late Mamluk and early Ottoman periods, as well as data on rural society generated by recent archaeological research, the work documents the complex, dialectical relationships that always existed between the Mamluk state and the tribal societies of Jordan, as well as the flexible strategies pursued by both to adapt to changing circumstances during the late medieval period. It is ultimately a provincial perspective on imperial decline, reform, and rebirth that sheds new light on the mechanisms of socio-political and economic change through the experiences of ordinary people living on the margins of empire.
Reflections of Empire: Archaeological and Ethnographic Studies on the Pottery of the Ottoman Levant
Editor: Bethany J. Walker
Ottoman archaeology has progressed significantly in the last ten years from a study of the "Dark Ages" to a multi-faceted investigation into the history and societies of the longest-lived Muslim empire of the Early Modern era. What have been missing from the scholarship of the period, however, are the nuts and bolts of Ottoman ceramics from a regional perspective: technical studies that identify and define assemblages and produce typologies and chronologies of specific wares that go beyond the site-specific studies dominant in current scholarship. This monograph addresses this gap in the literature by pulling together technical studies on pottery from the eastern frontiers of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Jordan. The geographical focus of the book recognizes the cultural, historical, and economic interconnections that made this region a distinctive orbit in the Ottoman sphere and that represent both the commonalities and diversities among the provinces that constituted the "Middle East" of the Ottoman world. The monograph presents previously unpublished Ottoman pottery from largely archaeological (and specifically stratified) contexts and assesses their potential for understanding the larger cultural history of the Ottoman's eastern frontier. The individual authors are leading ceramics specialists in the region and have each worked on multiple projects in different countries. Rather than merely a collection of individual studies, the monograph is comparative and synthesizes our current knowledge of Ottoman ceramics in a way that is useful technically to field archaeologists and on a theoretical level to scholars of Ottoman social history.
Le pouvoir à l’âge des sultanats dans le Bilād al-Shām.
Editors: Bethany J. Walker and Jean-François Salles
This monograph represents the proceedings of the Amman conference, which was held jointly at IFPO (L’Institut Français du Proche Orient) and ACOR (American Center of Oriental Research) 13-15 May 2005 3 . Our regional conference highlighted Bilad al-Sham and Iraq/ Iran between the twelfth and early nineteenth centuries, as representing transitional geographic and chronological zones in the creation and then collapse of the sultanate system. For six months prior to the conference, the six participants, representing what we believed to be some of the most innovative scholarship on the Crusader, Ayyubid/Mamluk, and Ottoman Bilad al-Sham and Il Khanid Iran, collaborated long-distance on the project theme, by reorienting our research to explore the conference theme, exchanging with one another drafts of our work and offprints of previously published work, and through regular e-mails.
This region represents not only a political but also a religious and cultural frontier, where power relations were represented by a variety of actors and where multiple identities and loyalties materialized, often simultaneously. The region is a place of contention on many levels where imperial and local administrative, economic, social and military structures often fluctuated. Bilad al-Sham, for the Crusader and Ayyubid/Mamluk/Ottoman world, and Iran, for the Mongols, give us a uniquely provincial perspective, from which we can cull local voices thanks to the written and material record
Articles
Articles avalibale in Academia
For Prof. Dr. Bethany J. Walker's full list of publications, see her profile page here
https://www.academia.edu/