Archaeology of early Islam in Eastern Arabia and the Arab-Persian Gulf

The School of Archaeology invites you to a guest lecture by Dr Agnieszka Lic.

PLEASE NOTE CHANGE IN VENUE!

Abstract

Over the last decades, Islamic archaeology has become a field of research in its own right. However, while “central” Islamic lands of Bilād al-Shām (Greater Syria), Iraq and Iran in the early Islamic era are relatively well understood, the region of Eastern Arabia and the Gulf is still understudied and we lack answers to some basic research questions related to the Christian and Muslim communities living in this area in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. In order to illustrate these challenges, draw a picture of the state of research and discuss trajectories of the subdiscipline's development, examples of settlements from the period in question from Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and the Iranian side of the Gulf will be presented. Discussed will be mainly problems of the morphology of settlements, urbanism, architecture and visual culture.

Bio

Agnieszka Lic is an archaeologist and art historian specialising in the archaeology and visual culture of Eastern Arabia and the Gulf in the Early Islamic period. She completed her doctorate dedicated to stucco decorations of churches in Southern Mesopotamia and the Gulf region in the early Islamic period at the School of Archaeology of the University of Oxford in 2018. Since 2022, she has been an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Currently, she is a Guest Researcher at the University of Copenhagen.