Lost Civilization: The Contested Islamic Past in Spain and Portugal

Description

Al-Andalus, the Iberian Islamic civilization centred on Cordoba in the tenth and eleventh centuries, has been a 'lost' civilization in several respects. Its history suppressed or denied for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was regarded as a kind of 'historical parenthesis' with no lasting influence. Over the past twenty-five years, however, the history and archaeology of the Islamic period in the Iberian peninsula has undergone a complete transformation. Lost Civilization presents an introduction to this debate as it has played out in archaeology, taking a comparative civilizations approach that puts the formation of al-Andalus in context with corresponding developments elsewhere in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

James L. Boone is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico

Boone's Lost civilization is a valuable essay upon the history of Islamic civilisation in the Iberian peninsula. * Antiquity (December 2010) *