A tale of pots and people

An unwritten material history of everyday life in the Bukhara Oasis during the long first millennium

Projektbeschreibung

The project’s objective is to elucidate the dynamics that shaped the Bukhara Oasis in the pre-Islamic era, spanning the period from the 4th/3rd century BCE to the 8th century CE. The Bukhara Oasis constitutes a unique and inestimable case study of an oasis system developed in historical times (post-4th century BCE) when the former swampy area progressively dried out leaving this space for cultivable lands in the oasis. Its development can be followed through all these centuries when the oasis progressively became one of the major hubs within the Silk Roads network and an important regional polity in the area. Therefore, the Bukhara Oasis is a key cross-section for the long first millennium through which the research will analyse the development of a Central Asian oasis system and disentangle the interwoven influences of long-term interactions between the dynamics of the neighbouring empires or political formations and the local and regional dynamics of the oasis, node of the broader network of the Silk Roads. Lastly, it is in this context that we are able to understand the human response to these political, cultural, and socio-economic dynamics, and how these entanglements have contributed to shape the material worlds of the local communities.

However, its early phases, before the oasis was integrated into the late Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphates between the 8th and 9th centuries CE, are poorly documented. The latter consist mostly of sources from outside Central Asia that refer to neighbouring empires and regional political formations, and completely overlook the Bukhara Oasis, its population, and the political, social, cultural, and economic dynamics of a given period. The gradual emergence of Bukhara as a historical landscape since the 4th/3rd centuries BCE and its history must be based on the evidence of material culture.

This data-driven project aims to get insight into the everyday life of the oasis inhabitants, the agencies of the everyday objects in the practices of ordinary people, and how these entanglements between humans and things were affected by the major Central Asian dynamics and historical events. With an analytical approach that incorporates an archaeological-historical perspective, this study will ultimately provide a long-term ‘material history’ of everyday life in the oasis that looks behind and beyond conventional historical accounts. To achieve these results, the research will focus on ceramics as an excellent material marker, abundantly found in archaeological excavations, analysing this dataset within its assemblages and archaeological contexts. The data derives from the unpublished assemblages found during the activities of the “Mission Archéologique Franco-Ouzbèke dans l'Oasis de Boukhara of the Musée du Louvre” (MAFOUB) alongside a comparative study of the archaeological literature and will be examined using the research tools developed in the current material culture studies and archaeological theories.