CONVERSION TO ISLAM AND ISLAMISATION IN EASTERN ETHIOPIA
Today we hosted at our excavations in Harlaa 30 Archaeology and Heritage BA Undergraduate students and two lecturers from Addis Ababa University. They were shown around the site and briefed on the discoveries, interpretations about Islamisation and international contacts, and excavation principles and methodology.
– Tim
On 15th January I was invited to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, my alma mater, to give an evening seminar as part of the East Asian Art and Archaeology Research Seminar (EARS) series. I gave a broad introduction to the consumption of Chinese ceramics in Africa and an overview of what I’ve done in the first year of my Ph.D. before focusing on data from Harlaa. There was a lot of interest in the project generally, and especially in the Harlaa data, and I was commended for fitting Africa into the East Asian Research Seminars!
– Hannah
I gave a well-attended lecture on the ‘Becoming Muslim’ research with an emphasis upon hypotheses concerning Islamisation at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies today (16th January). Useful questions and comments were received and the resonances with Islamisation processes in other regions such as South-East Asia were apparent.
– Tim
Nine papers covering various research projects, including “Becoming Muslim”, were presented at the successful second annual PhD and Postdoctoral seminar of the Centre for Islamic Archaeology on 12th December 2018. Time was too short, and there was a lot of lively debate and questions.
– Tim
Last weekend Nadia Khalaf and I attended the African Archaeological Research Day (AARD) hosted this year at the University of Cambridge. I presented a paper providing an overview of the local ceramics from Harlaa. As I arrived on the Friday before the conference I also had the opportunity to attend an interesting Seminar hosted by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and African Archaeology Group on Human-Environmental Dynamics in Madagascar Archaeology. AARD itself was host to a wide range of papers from across Africa covering from Early Hominids to post-Colonial archaeology as well as contemporary Heritage concerns. My paper was well received and I had some interesting discussion about potential wider links between the local Harlaa ceramics and the wider region.
– Nick
Last week I attended the ICES20 conference at Mekelle University, Ethiopia. The theme of the conference was ‘Regional and Global Ethiopia – Interconnections and Identities’. My talk was part of the session ‘The Medieval Ethiopian Dynamics (12th-17th C): State, People, Space and Knowledge in Movement’ organized by Ayenachew Deresse and Marie-Laure Durat. This interesting session featured a range of speakers who focused on the history, religion and society of medieval Ethiopia. My talk discussed the results of the survey undertaken as part of the ‘Becoming Muslim’ fieldwork in Harlaa village during the 2017 and 2018 fieldwork seasons.
The ‘Becoming Muslim’ project invited our representative from the Authority for Research and Conservation of the Cultural Heritage (ARCCH) Misganaw Gebremichael to join me in Mekelle for the conference. Misganaw presented in the session ‘Inter-disciplinary interconnections for the scientific growth of Ethiopian archaeology’ chaired by Catherine D’Andrea. His talk titled ‘A preliminary report of the Kudina rock art site, Afar National Regional State’ discussed results of a field survey carried out in 2017 which documented new rock art sites in the Afar region of Ethiopia.
The whole event was a great success for Mekelle University and those working in Ethiopia who helped to organise it. We look forward to the next one in Addis Ababa in 2021.
– Nadia
Yesterday (8th October) I gave a lecture on the “Becoming Muslim” research to the Centre for Historical Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Leicester. Interesting potential regional connections that we can pursue were suggested!
– Tim
We are pleased to welcome a new PhD student to the Centre for Islamic Archaeology, Awet Teklehimanot whose thesis title is “Human Settlement, Trade and Cultural Networks in the Southern Red Sea in the Islamic Period: The Case of Dahlak Kebir”.
– Tim
I organised a session at the biennial Landscape Archaeology Conference at Newcastle and Durham Universities last week. The session ‘Landscape Archaeology in Africa’s later prehistory: new methods and current research’ attracted a range of scholars working in different areas of Africa. I also spoke about the ‘Becoming Muslim’ project in the session ‘Remote Sensing and Archaeology’.
– Nadia
In September, I gave three lectures including material from the “Becoming Muslim” project in China, at Peking and Tsinghua Universities in Beijing, and at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an.
– Tim
