I’ve had the pleasure, over the last two weekends, of catching the tail end of both days of the Global Islamic Archaeology Showcase, organized by Awet T. Araya and Hannah Parsons-Morgan, both affiliated with the University of Exeter’s Centre for Islamic Archaeology. (I only caught the tail end of both days because of the time difference, of course, although I would have liked to tune in for more.) The event itself was great, and I wish I’d been able to submit an abstract, but between summer teaching and some other commitments just wasn’t able to get a submission together in time. The papers I did see were very interesting, though, and covered a broad geographic and temporal span. This coverage led to a question raised for discussion at the end of the event about what to make of Islamic archaeology as a discipline spanning more than 1,000 years across multiple continents.
The two major opinions came from Hagit Nol, currently affiliated with Université libre de Bruxelles, I believe, and José C. Carvajal López of the University of Leicester. Hagit argued, to some extent, against the utility of this broad definition, pointing out that what’s really useful for most researchers tends to be more geographically and temporally constrained. She pointed out that many talks at the Showcase were very interesting, but “interesting in the same way I find talks about Denmark interesting.” I bring up that quote because it raises, perhaps unintentionally, another point about the conception of the discipline. Given the number of ‘Abbasid coins that have been found in Denmark, for example, how distinct can we consider Islamic archaeology from other Afro-Eurasian medieval/historical archaeologies? (Similar points were raised when we considered definitions of “medieval archaeology” during the Conference on Medieval Archaeology years ago.) Carvajal López took a somewhat opposed view, and argued that the difficulty separating religion from other aspects of life that have, apparently, been seen as a weakness of Islamic archaeology should be seen as an opportunity, instead. (The degree to which religion and other aspects of life can actually be easily separated in any other type of archaeology is, I think, debatable, to say the least, but that isn’t really what I want to comment on here.) In one sense, this discussion recalls previous debates over the definition of Islamic archaeology, and Islamic vs. Islamicate history before that (a terminological distinction that also came up in the discussion). For the most part, I’ve tended to adopt Marcus Milwright’s (2010) interpretation of Islamic archaeology as “a term of convenience,” but I suppose that this is a bit like defining art as “I know it when I see it.”
This got me thinking, though, about what we’re trying to do with this definition. These are mostly scattered thoughts, but I think it’s important to think through what the term is actually doing, and what we would like it to do. While a lot of new and exciting archaeology is happening that is or could be called Islamic archaeology, Islamic archaeology isn’t exactly a discipline. There are a number of centers focusing on it, mostly in Europe (the Silsila Center at NYU is the only example I can think of in the US, and I’m not sure I’d be comfortable calling its focus Islamic archaeology, exactly), and an excellent journal, but there isn’t really a professional society, a major conference, etc. In the US, there are people doing Islamic archaeology in departments of anthropology, history, art history, and NELC (also archaeology, but there aren’t many of those departments), but it’s a bit of a tough sell in any of those disciplines. Beyond that, though, this is one of a number of disciplinary identities for any archaeologist. John Cooper brought this up in his comment at the Showcase, when he pointed out that, as a maritime archaeologist, he presents at both maritime archaeology and Islamic archaeology events, realizing he’s slightly out of place at both, but I think this is true for all of us. I’m an Islamic archaeologist, but also an anthropological archaeologist, an “industrial” archaeologist, a mining archaeologist, a historical archaeologists, increasingly an environmental archaeologist, etc. I think this argues in favor of defining the field fairly broadly to include anyone who considers what they do to be “Islamic archaeology.” On the other hand, if a field is defined as scholars with shared interests and shared questions, that raises the question of what, exactly, those interests and questions are. Beyond this, though, I think there are very real questions of what our professional, rather than scholarly, identities are and can be as Islamic archaeologists. It’s important to remember that being in academia is a job, and members of our discipline have to get jobs in academic departments as they exist. It’s difficult to look at academic archaeology in the US and come to the conclusion that Islamic archaeology has been particularly successful in doing this. (I’ve certainly been told by mentors that Islamic archaeology is going to be difficult to pitch to anthropology departments, and I can confirm that this is the case.) Obviously, I don’t have a solution to this, but I think as the discipline continues to develop and grow, we need to start having more of these conversations about not only how to define Islamic archaeology, but how to make increase our visibility within the disciplines where we might actually be hired.