St John Simpson Curator at the British Museum in London Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: July 2025 – September 2025 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Urban transformations and Islamisation from Iraq to Central Asia« Project outline: Archaeology is a fundamental means of testing interpretations based on written sources. This is vitally important for the Sasanian period where there are very few indigenous written sources and for the period immediately after the Islamic conquest where the narratives are concerned with military and political issues. It is equally potent when it comes to examining cultural change through the medium of everyday material culture. One of the big questions is how far and how fast did Islamisation affect people in the countryside or big urban centres in the first centuries after the Islamic Conquest? Previous studies have focused on the southern Levant and Persian Gulf but this project examines two case-studies based on my own archaeological projects: one a »marsh Arab« township at Kobeba in central Iraq (Dhi-Qar provinbce, midway between Baghdad and Basrah), the other a major Central Asian oasis city, Merv (present-day Turkmenistan). It is intended that through analysis of the archaeological data from both sets out it is possible to show cultural transformation and changing networks following the Islamic Conquest. The aim is to analyse the pottery and glass assemblages from each, and use these corpora to re-assess those from the Iraqi Western Desert and Persian Gulf for Kobeba, and particularly Soviet excavations in Central Asia for Merv, and build new form and function-based typologies for both regions. This allows us to build a better chronological context for analysing the environmental, cultural and religious evidence from both sites, and by so doing explore the effects of change in two core areas of the Islamic world, one at the heart of Iraq and the other a springboard for the extension of the Islamic Conquest into Afghanistan and Central Asia. (St John Simpson) (St John Simpson) Research partner: St John Simpson follows the invitation of Hagit Nol, Junior Professor of Islamic Archaeology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. His stay is supported by the project »Islamic Archaeology and Art History« (IAAH) funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. Scholarly profile of St John SimpsonSt John Simpson is an archaeologist and a senior curator at the British Museum, London, where he is responsible for the collections from Arabia, Iran and Central Asia in the Department of the Middle East and the repatriations to host countries of antiquities seized by UK law enforcement.Website: Please find more information about St John Simpson here. Main areas of research: Late Antique and early medieval material culture from Iraq, Iran, Caucasus, Persian Gulf and Central AsiaSelected publications:
|