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

不同种族和宗教群体之间的接触往往导致紧张的社会边界谈判、迫害，甚至种族灭绝和战争。有机会审查这些群体之间过去的互动为发展更大的跨文化理解提供了新的可能性。这个博士论文研究项目将采用考古，历史和生物学数据，提供移民，宗教皈依和伊比利亚半岛的社会互动的细微差别的背景下检查后，穆斯林阿拉伯人和柏柏尔人征服半岛（公元711-1492）。该项目的成果将阐明伊斯兰文化和人民在伊比利亚半岛传播的动态，这一动态仍有争议，人们对此知之甚少。该项目将表明，更好地了解历史背景和深刻的时间观念，在这个移民紧张局势和种族独特的宗教团体之间的冲突时代非常重要。为了探索宗教和种族身份通过文化接触而改变的方式，本项目将研究皈依而不是移民在多大程度上促进了征服后伊斯兰教的传播。研究人员承认宗教身份的个人性质和考古学上的识别困难，但提出配偶选择和葬礼仪式允许洞察宗教转换的公共和人际影响。对现代人类和非人类哺乳动物的家族研究表明，某些遗传的骨骼和牙齿特征为了解种群结构和亲缘关系提供了重要的信息。研究人员提出，在伊斯兰伊比利亚，社会群体关系的改变，特别是皈依和通婚的模式，将在这些特征的变化模式中被识别出来。为了估计伊斯兰时期的方差变化，研究人员将采用生物距离分析，即利用骨骼和牙齿特征来推断遗传相关性，对3世纪至18世纪的伊比利亚和北非样本进行检查。将记录一套颅骨和牙齿测量和非测量特征并进行统计分析。这些分析的结果将被解释沿着与历史和考古数据，以确定部分人口在南部的伊比利亚，似乎已经转换到伊斯兰教，这些转换的一般时间，以及在何种程度上通婚有助于这一进程。

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.