Sacred Colors and Nomadic Design: The Hand-Formed Slip-Painted Pottery of the Medieval (Eighth–Twelfth Century CE) Central Asian Highlands

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.

This paper addresses how social identity, as reflected in networks represented through pottery decoration, served as a means of mediating and buffering against the social uncertainties generated by shifting political and religious landscapes of medieval Central Asia. My project examines the decoration and distribution of hand-formed slip-painted pottery (HSP) to understand how these objects may reflect social identity construction or continuity across different social and geographic environments. I use the medieval site of Tashbulak (TBK), located in the highlands of southeastern Uzbekistan, as a case study, due to the unusually high concentration of HSP found at the site. The unusual distribution of HSP at Tashbulak suggests that the occupants were recent migrants into the region, moving with the spread of the Qarakhanids, or that they were an indigenous community who found themselves adapting to the increased spread of Turkic tribespeople from the northeast. I measure decorative and formal diversity of HSP and its prevalence through an analysis of decorative variables recorded from pottery excavated at TBK. By comparing these types of diversity, I will test how this variation informs us about life at TBK, and about regional variation of social identities across highland Central Asia in the medieval period.

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): 32223