This book presents the results of a colloquium on the ‘Materiality of the Rural Islamic Economy’ held in Copenhagen in 2012 by the newly established Materiality in Islam Research Initiative (MIRI) directed by Alan Walmsley. Given that the large majority of the population in the pre-modern Middle East lived in rural communities, this book presents a significant attempt to understand some of the mechanisms of a civilisation that is normally thought of as primarily urban.

In some senses, the title of this book is misleading because it does not really discuss the evolution of landscapes but is mostly concerned with specific sites and monuments in extra-urban environments. The one exception to this is the Introduction, written by the late Tony Wilkinson, a pioneer of landscape archaeology in the Middle East. In addition to providing a review of the various papers in the volume, Wilkinson draws out some broader themes of relevance to landscape such as the spread of canal-fed irrigation agriculture into the less-arid regions of Mesopotamia.

Although the subtitle of the collection suggests the contributors draw on archaeology, history and ethnography, all of the papers except one (Chapter 1) are based primarily on archaeological investigation. Given the wealth of information and the high quality of the analysis presented, there is perhaps little need for historical chapters; some discussion of the rural hinterland as expressed through Arab historians would, however, have been useful. In particular it would have been helpful to have some consideration of authors such as al-Muqaddasi (AD 945–992), who wrote about the network of settlements in different regions of the Islamic world, or the historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who wrote about the relationship between sedentary and nomadic life in North Africa. The chronological span of the book is considerable, from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries AD, yet the majority of the papers are concerned with the medieval or ‘Middle Islamic’ period (c. twelfth to sixteenth centuries). It should also be pointed out that the geographic scope of the chapters does not include the whole Islamic world and is restricted to the Arab Middle East and the adjacent areas of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Even some areas traditionally included in studies of the medieval Islamic world do not feature to any degree (e.g. Egypt and North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Iran, Turkey and the Balkans), while other areas such as sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia are not even considered. In fact, the main focus of the book appears to be the region known to Islamic specialists as Bilad al-Sham (Jordan, Syria and Lebanon), with more than half of the studies coming from this region (four chapters on Jordan and three on Syria). To a certain extent, this distribution reflects the opportunities of fieldwork rather than any particular bias in the choice of papers, although it would have been interesting to have a wider geographic perspective.

The book is divided into four sections, each dealing with different themes: Part 1: ‘Hydroeconomies’; Part 2: ‘Agriculture, pastoralism and subsistence’; Part 3: ‘Landscapes of commerce and production’; and Part 4: ‘Transience and permanence: movement and memory in the landscape’. As is often the case with edited books of this nature, both the names of the sections and the division of articles between them seem slightly arbitrary. For example, Stephen McPhillips's paper on water mills on the Orontes (Chapter 8) and Astrid Meir's paper on Ottoman water administration (Chapter 1) could well have featured in the same section. Given that there are many overlapping themes within all the papers, however, the division into sections is not of great significance. In fact, one of the strengths of the book is that different papers often discuss similar issues from different perspectives. Karin Bartl's article on the desert palace of Qasr Mushash (Chapter 3) discusses how formerly nomadic Arabs established architectural settlements, just as the paper by David Thomas and Alison Gascoigne (Chapter 9) discusses the use of architecture by the nomadic Ghurid dynasty in Afghanistan. The region discussed in Karin Bartl's chapter on Qasr Mushash also relates to Bethany Walker's discussion of liquid landscapes (Chapter 10) in the same region.

Throughout the book there is a sense of continuity from pre-Islamic times, including the revival of copper smelting in Wadi Faynan in the thirteenth century (Chapter 6) and the re-use of ancient cairns for burial in the Homs region of Syria during the medieval Islamic period (Chapter 11). In this context, although not included in this volume, it is worth mentioning the work at Khirbet Faris during the 1990s; this was the first major interdisciplinary project to investigate long-term changes in a rural settlement from the Roman period up to the nineteenth century (McQuitty Reference McQuitty2007).

The search for continuity is also stated explicitly in Alan Walmsley's Conclusion where he points out that the majority of archaeological investigations in the Middle East have been concerned primarily with the pre-Islamic period, leaving the archaeology of Islamic civilisation seriously under-researched. In general terms, the lack of investment in the archaeology of Muslim societies has allowed the perpetuation of the popular view of the Islamic period as an era of economic and social decline. The investigation of the Islamic past is particularly important at a time when the complexities of Islamic societies in the Middle East are seen reflected in the multiple civil wars within the region. Walmlsey also makes the point that while there have been some investigations of the archaeology of urban society, the rural or extra-urban dimensions of Islamic society have been largely ignored by both the medieval Arab historians and modern archaeologists. This book presents some important exceptions to that urban bias, and taken together, the examples give a portrait of a dynamic and highly connected civilisation (cf. Wilkinson's remarks in the Introduction).

Reading this book, two main conclusions are evident. The first is that there are a wide variety of analytical techniques and investigative methods that can be used to understand how rural Islamic society functioned and adapted to change. Secondly, it is apparent that considerable further archaeological work is required to equal the level of knowledge that we have acquired about medieval life in Europe. With so much destruction and conflict in the contemporary Middle East, much of it in areas covered by this book, the need to gain a deeper understanding of the past societies of this region has never been more important.