Reconstructing Production Technology of Medieval Lead-Glazed Ceramics from Central Asian Silk Road Sites

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Identity, Interpretation, and Innovation: The Worlds of Islamic Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Central Asia has long been the connecting bridge facilitating the long-distance trade of goods across Eurasia. While Central Asian communities have served as trading centers, they were also producers of specialty goods and centers of technological innovation themselves. In this study we examine the technological variation within and between locally produced Central Asian glazed ceramics and imported Islamic lead-glazed wares during the Early Islamic period. Compositional analysis of ninth–twelfth-century CE ceramics excavated from eleven Silk Road sites located along the northern edge of the Tien Shen mountains in Kazakhstan has demonstrated local production of lead-glazed ceramics and the concurrent presence of imported ceramics from Southwest Asia. A representative collection of ceramics (n = 45) were characterized by scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS), and electron microprobe analysis (EMPA) including locally produced ceramics, imported ceramics from Southwest Asia, and lead-glazed ceramics whose origin was unidentified by compositional analysis. Based on the results we can reconstruct the direct transfer and adoption of lead-glazing technology from the Islamic world into the lands north of the Tien Shen mountains in the ninth–tenth century CE with local innovation of in the production of yellow transparent and opaque glazed ceramics given regional availability of raw materials.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Identity, Interpretation, and Innovation: The Worlds of Islamic Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32462