The Hand-Formed Slip-Painted Pottery of the Central Asian Highlands: History, and a Case-Study at Tashbulak

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The hand-formed, slip-painted pottery (HSP) of the Central Asian highlands is found in mountainous and early Turkic sites throughout the region. It is understudied, and the pottery appears in only a limited number of archaeological syntheses and reports. HSP spread to the Central Asian lowlands in tandem with the spread of the Turkic Qarakhanids, who ruled over a large part of Central Asia between 900 and 1250 AD. This paper is an overview of archaeological research that discusses the hand-formed slip-painted pottery of the Central Asian highlands during the late antique and medieval period (600–1250 AD). In addition to a literature overview, I discuss the HSP that has been found at the archaeological site of Tashbulak in the highlands of Uzbekistan, comparing my findings thus far with those of past and current researchers. As it is understood today, this pottery provides an opportunity to better understand how these early-medieval Turks expressed and disseminated their unique, nomadic, mountain identities while spreading their Turko-nomadic rule over the urban and lowland regions of Central Asia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35702.0