Rural Spaces through a Ceramic Lens.

Between late antiquity and the medieval period, from the 3rd to 10th centuries, large empires the Sasanian and subsequently the early Islamic empires extended over an enormous territory from Iraq to Central Asia. While we know a lot about their cities and palaces, and written sources inform us about their emperors, we know surprisingly little about how ordinary people lived in the countryside. This project aims to change that situation by studying something found and used everywhere: pottery. Even today, we can tell much about someone`s life by looking at their personal belongings, their containers, cooking pots and dishes. Equally, ancient pottery reveals how people lived, worked, and connected with each other. Every farmstead, small estate or village used pottery for cooking, storing food, serving meals, and transporting goods. By carefully analyzing qualitatively and quantitatively thousands of pottery fragments from recent excavations, we can piece together a picture of daily rural life. The project focuses on two regions that were important borderlands of these empires: the foothills of the Zagros mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Kugitang mountains in Uzbekistan. Both areas served as crucial passageways for trade and cultural exchange but they were also zones in which political control was staked out. By comparing pottery from small rural sites in these regions, we can understand how connected or isolated these communities were. This concerns not only the various vessel types. Using scientific analysis, we can determine where the clay came from, what manufacturing techniques potters used and at which temperatures they fired their kilns. This tells us whether rural communities made their own pottery or obtained it through trade networks. We can also see if imperial control affected what kinds of pottery people used. Such insights matter because historical texts mainly tell us about emperors, battles, and cities not about farmers, lowly landlords and villagers who made up a significant part of the population. By giving rural communities a voice through their material remains, we gain a more complete understanding of these important empires. The project challenges the traditional view that rural areas were merely passive providers for cities and military units, revealing instead that they actively and self-determinedly participated in the various forms of economic and cultural exchange of their time.