Islamic Archaeology
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Iberia: Medieval Archaeology
Definition
Juan Antonio Quiro´s-Castillo University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Medieval archaeology in Iberia encompasses many “archaeologies” with different chronological and thematic concerns, all of which are the result of diverse conceptual and historiographical approaches and have had, until recently, different academic trajectories. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, various Germanic groups occupied Hispania in the fifth century, although only the Sueves (in the northwest of the peninsula) and the Visigoths managed to establish stable kingdoms. Archaeological analysis of these early medieval centuries has given rise to a specific “archaeology of the Visigoths” which is profoundly marked by cultural historicism. Alternatively, the study of the origins of Christianity and its early monuments has produced a paleochristian archaeology characterized by art-historical concerns. All of these trends have been supplanted in the last three decades by “early medieval” archaeology, which has been oriented toward the social aspects of landscape study, and based upon data provided by numerous excavations in cities, monumental spaces, and rural areas. One of the principal particularities of the Iberian peninsula during the Middle Ages is the coexistence, over many centuries, of feudal political formations alongside Islamic state-based polities, after the conquest of the Visigothic kingdom in 711. The historical development of the
Introduction Medieval archaeology in Iberia is a relatively young discipline that aims to study the societies of the Hispanic landscape during the millennium spanning from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries (the traditional key dates remain the fall of the western Roman Empire in 476, and the conquest of the Nasrid dynasty of Granada and the discovery of the Americas, both of which occurred in 1492) (Fig. 1). From its very beginnings (in Iberia), archaeological study has been oriented toward the study of the material manifestations of Islamic society (andalusı´ archaeology) and Christian society (early medieval archaeology and feudal archaeology). The three characteristics that define its practice are: its underdeveloped academic profile; the role that rescue archaeology has acquired in recent years; and a notable atheoretical quality which has manifested itself via a striking dependence on the paradigms and approaches favored by medievalists working with textual sources, as well as a lack of epistemological and methodological reflection.
C. Smith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
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Iberia: Medieval Archaeology
Iberia: Medieval Archaeology, Fig. 1 Principal sites mentioned in the text
territory dominated by the Islamic states, known as al-Andalus (in classical Arabic )ﺩﻝﺱ, took the course it did in part as a result of the growing pressure exercised by feudal powers to the north (a process traditionally known as reconquista), and in part bec
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