Islamic and Medieval Archaeology

Between the Muslim conquest of 711 and the capture of the Algarve by King Afonso III, dated to 1249, what is now Portuguese territory was part of Gharb al-Andalus, the western frontier of al-Andalus. For nearly five centuries, an urban, rural, and religiously plural society developed here, the archaeology of which only began to be systematically studied in the second half of the 20th century. Studying the Islamic and medieval period largely involves reconstructing the daily life of cities that remain inhabited today, where traces are hidden beneath modern neighborhoods.

Gharb al-Andalus

The Gharb was the westernmost part of al-Andalus, organized around five major territories—the region of Coimbra, the Tagus estuary, Upper and Lower Alentejo, and the Algarve—which extended into the Spanish regions of Extremadura and western Andalusia. Its main cities—Coimbra, Lisbon, Santarém, Silves, Mértola, and Faro—were nodes in a Mediterranean network of trade, taxation, and culture. The province recurrently resisted centralization from Córdoba and, around 1110, even split into three districts. Silves, the Xelb of Arabic texts, was the capital of a taifa and was remembered as the “Baghdad of the West,” the land of poets al-Mu’tamid and Ibn ‘Ammar.

Portuguese Islamic archaeology emerged less from isolated ruins and more from living cities: it was urban excavation, house by house, that restored the face of a society that Christian texts of the Reconquista had reduced to an enemy.

Islamic Ceramics and Houses

Until the 1980s, research on the period was scarce. The turning point came with the projects in Mértola and Silves, which made ceramics the primary tool for dating and social interpretation. Glazed tableware, kitchen and dining types, and their decorative techniques allowed contexts to be sequenced between the 9th and 13th centuries and mapped production and exchange circuits across the Gharb. From 2008 onward, projects like CIGA—dedicated to Islamic ceramics of Gharb al-Andalus—systematized this corpus.

Urban excavation also revealed a Mediterranean-style house typology, organized around a courtyard, with each compartment serving a defined function. Exterior walls rested on a stone foundation and rose in rammed earth (taipa), about half a meter thick, while thin adobe partitions separated interior spaces. The Almohad neighborhood of Mértola’s alcáçova, from the 12th–13th centuries, is the best-known ensemble and offers the most complete portrait of living in the southern peninsula at the end of Islamic rule.

From the Reconquista to the Medieval Palimpsest

Medieval archaeology is not limited to the Islamic world. The same stratigraphy documents the long transition between the Roman and Late Antique periods—visible in sites like Idanha-a-Velha, the ancient Egitânia—and the Christian reorganization following the Reconquista, with new parishes, castles, and urban grids superimposed on earlier ones. The study of materials, walls, and cemeteries shows that no layer entirely erased the one before it.

Understanding this period requires cross-referencing material evidence with Islamic art in Portugal and situating it within the broader trajectory of Portuguese archaeology, where the medieval period emerges as a dense palimpsest, still far from exhausted by excavation.