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The earliest water buffalo in the Caucasus: shifting animals and people in the medieval Islamic world

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2021

Paul D. Wordsworth ,
Ashleigh F. Haruda ,
Alicia Ventresca Miller Open the ORCID record for Alicia Ventresca Miller [Opens in a new window]  and
Samantha Brown
Paul D. Wordsworth*
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, UK
Ashleigh F. Haruda
Affiliation:
Central Natural Science Collections, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany PalaeoBARN, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, UK
Alicia Ventresca Miller
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, University of Michigan, USA
Samantha Brown
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany Institute for Scientific Archaeology, University of Tübingen, Germany
*
*Author for correspondence ✉ [email protected]
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Abstract

The expansion of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates (seventh to ninth centuries AD) brought diverse regions from the Indus Valley to the Eurasian Steppe under hegemonic control. An overlooked aspect of this political process is the subsequent translocation of species across ecological zones. This article explores species introduction in the early Islamic world, presenting the first archaeological evidence for domestic water buffalo in the Caucasus—identified using zooarchaeological and ZooMS methods on material from the historical site of Bardhaʿa in Azerbaijan. We contextualise these finds with historical accounts to demonstrate the exploitation of medieval marginal zones and the effects of centralised social reorganisation upon species dispersal.

Keywords

CaucasusIslamic archaeologyzooarchaeologywater buffaloZooMS
Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 95 , Issue 383 , October 2021 , pp. 1231 - 1247
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd.

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