Anatomy of a Medieval Islamic Ton Al-Basra, Morocco [Paperback]

This volume grew out of a symposium held at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Philadelphia in 2000. Entitled Anatomy of a Medieval Islamic City, the symposium highlighted a series of papers presented by graduate students and specialists who had worked at the archaeological site of al-Basra in Morocco. These papers focused on specific aspects of the medieval city, that, when presented together at the symposium, offered a rich mosaic of urban Islamic life during the first millennium A.D. in the western Mediterranean. The analyses presented in these papers were based on archaeological research conducted at al-Basra during the course of five summer field seasons in the 1990s. Contents: Chapter 1: Al-Basra in Historical and Archaeological Context; Chapter 2: Fortification Walls and Towers; Chapter 3: Food, Fuel, and Raw Material: Faunal Remains; Chapter 4: Agriculture, Industry, and the Environment: Archaeobotanical Evidence; Chapter 5: Pottery and Ethnic Change; Chapter 6: Clay Tiles and Roof Construction; Chapter 7: Islamic Burial Practices at Al-Basra; Chapter 8: Urban Women in Early Islamic Morocco; Chapter 9: Beyond Al-Basra: Settlement Systems of Medieval Northern Morocco in Archaeological and Historical Perspective; Chapter 10: An Archaeomagnetic Study of Two Kilns.The site of Al-Basra lies in northern Morocco and was said to have been founded during the break-up of the Islamic empire in North Africa and Spain in c.AD 800, only to have been abandoned just 300 years later.