Ifriqiya and the Central Maghreb

Abstract

North Africa played a pivotal part in the development of Islamic archaeology as a discipline through the important French excavations at the Qal’a of the Beni Hammad in Algeria in the late 19th century, one of the earliest excavations at an Islamic site by European archaeologists anywhere in the Islamic world. Despite this early promise, for most of the 20th century, the Islamic period was the preserve of art historians, with only a handful of small-scale excavations conducted at the spectacular palatial-cities, mosques, ribats, and fortresses of Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Since the 1990s, there has been a significant rise in the number of projects and amount of evidence available, as well as a new interest in revisiting old questions and models for the Islamic period. This chapter charts the development of Islamic archaeology and lays out the key scholarly debates in Ifriqiya and the central Maghreb, broadly understood as encompassing modern-day Tunisia, Algeria, and western coastal Libya.