Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Conquest And Conversion In Historic Islamic Iberia: A Bioarchaeological Approach

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Contact between distinctive ethnic and religious groups often results in tense social boundary negotiations, persecution, and even genocide and war. The opportunity to examine past interactions among these groups offers new possibilities for the development of greater cross-cultural understanding. This doctoral dissertation research project will employ archaeological, historical, and biological data to offer a contextualized examination of the nuances of migration, religious conversion, and social interaction in Iberia following the conquest of the peninsula by Muslim Arabs and Berbers (AD 711-1492). The results of this project will elucidate the dynamics of the spread of Islamic culture and peoples in the Iberian Peninsula, which remain contested and poorly understood. This project will demonstrate that a better understanding of historical contexts and deep time perspectives is keenly relevant in this era of migration tensions and conflicts between ethnically distinctive religious groups. In order to explore the manner in which religious and ethnic identities are altered through culture contact, this project will examine the degree to which conversion, rather than migration, contributed to the spread of Islam following conquest. The researchers acknowledge the personal nature of religious identity and the archaeological difficulty in discernment, yet propose that mate choice and funerary ritual allow insight into the public and interpersonal ramifications of religious conversion. Family studies of modern humans and non-human mammals suggest that certain inherited skeletal and dental traits provide significant insight into population structure and relatedness. The researchers propose that altered social group affiliations in Islamic Iberia, particularly patterns of conversion and intermarriage, will be recognizable in changing patterns of variation in these traits. To estimate changes in variance through the Islamic period, researchers will employ biodistance analysis, the use of skeletal and dental traits in the inference of genetic relatedness, in the examination of Iberian and North African samples dating from the 3rd to the 18th centuries. A suite of cranial and dental metric and nonmetric traits will be recorded and statistically analyzed. The results of these analyses will be interpreted along with historical and archaeological data to identify the segments of the population in southern Iberia that appear to have converted to Islam, the general timing of these conversions, and the degree to which intermarriage contributed to this process.