It is a proud moment for a new field when a handbook is published showing the breadth of scholarship from Spain to China. It is not easy to cover some 80 countries and 1,400 years in succinct reports. And yet, The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology does so successfully, while exposing shortcomings and unevenness in the field and suggesting paths for new research. In its totality, the volume is mature, reflecting development of the field over 40 years, with considerations of issues comparable to those of interest to specialists in other areas and eras. This handbook is geographical in format, with chapters on many underrepresented regions side by side with the central Islamic lands; this approach differs from earlier books, such as Timothy Insoll’s The Archaeology of Islam (1999), Alan Walmsley’s Early Islamic Syria: An Archaeological Assessment (2007), and Marcus Milwright’s An Introduction to Islamic Archaeology (2010). Further, the balanced presentation covers the period from the seventh through nineteenth centuries AD and even devotes a section to public history and community archaeology. The book’s aim is not to be comprehensive but introductory and regional in approach.
This review lacks the space either to summarize or evaluate in detail each of the book’s 36 chapters; rather, it focuses on larger issues in the field, the overall balance in its presentation, and the book’s potential usefulness. The book is perfectly primed for a role as research aid for researchers and students alike. It could become a course textbook with some improvements I recommend for a second edition.
The coeditors’ introduction is well written and sets up the volume effectively by providing an excellent genealogy of the field and its roots in art history and archaeology. The editors discuss the key issues of the book and are not shy about naming challenges, such as periodization, Islamization, and cultural heritage and provenance. Periodization is discussed comprehensively, but the individual contributors are free to utilize use their own schemes. The discussion on Islamization, key to a volume that explores the extent of Islam beyond its central lands and the early conquests, correctly centers on its complexity and the lack of a simple one-size-fits-all model. As the evidence overwhelmingly shows, the editors correctly favor models of “local cultural adaptations, staggered chronologies, and gradual religious change” (p. 8). Despite this preference, the editors let chapter authors define the processes of Islamization they recognize in their respective regions. A first critique is that few authors tackle this issue directly.
I also would have liked the introduction to attempt a definition of Islamic archaeology. However, the excellent chapters by Bert de Vries and by José C. Carvajal López, Jelena Živković, Alkindi Aljawabra, and Rim Lababidi in the last part of the book do provide interesting definitions. De Vries defines Islamic heritage (broader than archaeology) as the material remains and features, both extant and buried, of the cultures of Islamic civilization. López et alia, recognizing a debate in definition, settle on a broad characterization of the field as inclusive of a “wide range of interests and approaches to research on Islamic communities of all periods” (p. 731). Whereas the latter definition is too broad and exclusionary, the former appeals in its emphasis on culture rather than religion and, more accurately, on cultures. I would define the field of Islamic archaeology as the study of cultures and communities, including non-Islamic ones, living under Islamic authority.
The main contribution of the book is its impressive coverage of the field across Europe, Asia, and Africa by an exceptional and global group of writers. The editors divide the book into major regional sections: Central Islamic Lands, the Islamic West, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. Exemplary chapters include Marie-Odile Rousset’s “Northern Syria,” Scott Redford’s “Medieval Turkey,” Fenwick’s “Ifriqiya and the Central Maghreb,” Alexander Wain’s “Southeast Asia,” Marek Jankowiak’s “Contacts between the Islamic World and Northern Europe in the Pre-Mongol Period,” and “Ottoman Europe” by Ibolya Gerelyes, Athanasios Vionis, Vesna Bikić, Niculina Dinu, and Svitlana Biliaieva. Such a decentralized presentation has never been attempted before.
The final section, “Heritage Management and Community Development,” is remarkable and contains several provocative chapters, such as the introduction by de Vries, “Heritage in Context” by Nasser Rabbat, and “War and Recovery” by Stephennie Mulder. They are relevant in any discussion today not only on Islamic archaeology but also on archaeology and heritage, nationalism, and war writ large: archaeologists from any field should read the final section.
Collectively, however, the contributions might have been better balanced. Some chapters focus not on regions but on areas bounded within modern nation-states; for example, “The Maghreb al-Aqsa” (the country of Morocco) by Abdallah Fili, “The Nilotic Sudan” (the country of Sudan) by Intisar Soghayroun El Zein, and “Ethiopia” by Insoll. These are less successful, because the boundaries, products of twentieth-century colonialism, have had little to do with these geographic spaces for most of Islamic history.
In terms of the organization of each chapter, the introduction mentions an intended framework; however, it is not evenly implemented in the chapters, and the resulting nonconformity is jarring. Some authors organize material chronologically (Wain, Carlos Magnavita and Abubakar Sani Sule), some geographically (Pierre Siméon), and some thematically (Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Jeffrey Fleisher). Not all the chronologically organized chapters include the Late Islamic periods (Sam Nixon, Mehrdad Shokoohy and Natalie H. Shokoohy, although Filiz Yenişehiroğlu’s “Ottoman Anatolia” is valuable as a model of this recent scholarship). As previously stated, they use a range of terms and definitions for periods. Rather than leaving it to individual authors to choose, I would advocate using these periods—Early Islamic, Middle Islamic, and Late Islamic—following Whitcomb’s politically and culturally neutral divisions to avoid confusion.
The editors asked the contributors to address historiography and chronology; a survey of main sites; rural and urban landscapes; health, diet, and climate; archaeology of religion, gender, and labor; and new unpublished research. To this I would add a brief history of the region, including a pre-Islamic framing and a synthesis of the entire urban-suburban-rural landscape within the region’s environment. Presented in some chapters but not all should be a discussion of production, industry, and trade as understood via material culture, kilns, and archaeometric data for pottery, glass, metal (including coins), and shipwrecks. Finally, political challenges and framings, public history, community archaeology, and museum exhibitions (as valuably presented in Jacqueline M. Armijo’s “China”) would create important threads that are woven together in the final section of the book in chapters like Øystein LaBianca, Maria Elena Ronza, and Noël Harris’s “Community Archaeology in the Islamic World” and Trinidad Rico’s “Is There an ‘Islamic’ Practice for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage?” Better alignments of chapters about different regions of the Islamic world might more clearly reveal points of comparisons and contrasts, as well as gaps in knowledge in the field.
Major themes and debates appear throughout the volume where applicable or relevant to each region. Addressing these clearly in the introduction and section introductions as running sub-narratives would help the reader greatly and should be expanded on. Some debates, though now put to rest, can be reviewed for the student, such as Andrew M. Watson’s concept of an Islamic “Green Revolution” (see the discussion in Alessandra Molinari’s “Sicily”), the invisible Islamic conquests (although Simeon is the only author in the volume who continues to argue for jihad and conversion, but with no references), and material culture as indicators of social class. Some important differences between how historians and archaeologists characterize specific places remain relatively unexplored, as in the discussion of “al-Andalus” by Patrice Cressier and Sonia Gutiérrez Lloret: they show that the Almohad period (twelfth century AD) in the Iberian Peninsula was not stagnant but was flourishing with activity. Other unresolved debates can be explored as well; for instance, what was at the core (environmental shifts?) of a widespread trend of political fragmentation and settlement decline during the transitional periods between the Early and Middle Islamic periods (eleventh century AD) and between the Middle and Late Islamic periods (fifteenth century AD).
The book’s next major contribution lies in its inclusion of rural archaeology and its de-emphasis on monuments, so much a part of the origins of the field. As more research develops, more robust discussions of pastoralism could play larger roles, as in Emily Hammer’s The Archaeology of Pastoralism, Mobility, and Society: Beyond the Grass Paradigm (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Can there be a discussion evaluating urban and rural spaces together? What are the features of frontier fortifications as differentiated from trading sites, the religious motivations behind them, and how are they related to Islamization? One topic covered to varying degrees in several chapters (Ifriqiya and Central Maghreb, Maghreb al-Aqsa, al-Andalus) is the roles of the ribāṭ (frontier posts).
Because many areas covered in this volume sit at the borders of the Islamic world, there should be a critical and complex discussion of Islamization. A future volume can build on contributor Caravajal Lopez’s recent book, Islamization and Archaeology: Religion, Culture, and New Materialism (2024). Some chapters provide simplistic views of the process or do not address it directly, but a discussion of it should be included in each of the section introductions.
Discussing non-Islamic sites in Islamic regions is also crucial for developing broader understandings of past political landscapes, in which both Muslims and non-Muslims lived under Islamic authority. Insoll’s “Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa” does this well. Christian communities in the Fayyoum and White and Red Monasteries could have been included in Alison L. Gascoigne’s chapter about Egypt, monasteries on the Persian Gulf in Andrew Petersen’s chapter about Arabia, Christian Sudan in Soghayroun’s chapter, and non-Muslims in northern Syria (Rousset) and southern Syria (Bethany J. Walker). Considerations of non-Muslims also highlight the importance of pre-Islamic history in different areas, such as the transition from Sasanian and Soghdian settlements to Islamic ones: this could have been discussed in Rocco Rante’s “Persia,” and Simeon’s “Central Asia” chapters and is well integrated into the landscape of Iraq in Alastair Northedge’s chapter.
Certain sites were mentioned repeatedly in several chapters in the Islamic West and sub-Saharan Africa sections; for example, Sijilmasa was discussed in Fili’s, Nixon’s, and Insoll’s chapters about West Africa, and the sites of Agdaoust and Essouk-Tadmeka in the latter two. The title of the chapter covering west-central Africa, “Central Sudan,” by Magnavita and Sule, can be confusing to readers, given the title of Soghayroun’s chapter, “The Nilotic Sudan,” and the location of the modern nation of Sudan.
A second edition should also add chapters on some missing regions: Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy (with Sicily), the Balearics, the Caucasus (including sites in Azerbaijan like Barda and Shemakhi), the Indian Ocean islands (the Maldives), and Kurdistan / the Jazira. Another approach would be to fold some of these areas into chapters that address seas as regions, including littoral landscapes and the islands therein. Although at its core Braudelian, the envisioning of seas as regions (the Mediterranean, for example, and the Indian Ocean) in their own rights is becoming more popular and prevalent in contemporary scholarship.
Finally, I have some specific housekeeping suggestions. For an updated edition or similar future volume, the transliteration schemes should be consistent (i.e., Muqadassī or Maqdisī or Maqdissī, in reference to the name of an Arabic geographer). Figures should, in some cases, be more directly relevant to the text: some are unclear as to what they are showing, and some are more private photographs than archaeological photographs; for example, Figures 4.4.2 and 4.5.2. In some black-and-white illustrations, the area of intended focus is not always clear. For several chapters, more references should have been consulted and cited.
To conclude, this volume is an excellent resource for researchers. I tested it out while writing a paper for a conference where I had to synthesize my own area of expertise (eastern Mediterranean) with regions I have never worked in: West and East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Using the volume as a guide to regions less familiar to me worked very well. I understood the most important sites and issues in each region and was able to go deeper by following citations to relevant excavation reports.
I highly recommend the handbook and applaud it as an advancement in the field. I strongly recommend an updated second edition, which would help the book become a standard textbook in any course on Islamic archaeology. For transparency and collective improvement of our field, I am happy to provide chapter-level suggestions to the publisher, editors, or the chapter authors individually.
