5 - Pottery styles and social status in medieval Khurasan

Summary

The growth of cities in the early Islamic period stimulated many new designs of glazed pottery. One major production area was Khurasan – northeast Iran and adjacent parts of Afghanistan and Central Asia. The chronology and variety of pottery styles mirrors the chronology of conversion and the resultant emergence of political-religious factions. On this basis it is argued that factional differences carried social and aesthetic overtones. This study exemplifies the Annales technique of wedding material culture to other areas of historical enquiry.

Introduction

What the Annales school of historiography means to historians often differs from what it means to archaeologists. At least that is my perception as a historian who has published in Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations. For archaeologists, one attraction of the Annales approach may be that it provides a set of hypotheses, or at least rubrics, which enable them to integrate some of their data into a historical framework that is meaningful both to them and to a broader audience.

As a historian, however, I see the Annales approach less as a set of ideas than as a revolution in the concept of historical data. Nineteenth-century historiography was broad enough to encompass the precise attentiveness to documents of Leopold von Ranke's disciples, the hazy spiritualism of historians influenced by Georg Friedrich Hegel, and the attempts at scientific analysis of the Marxists. Yet there was comparatively little breadth in defining historical data. Some historians favored government documents and diplomatic correspondence.