Internet Archaeol. 25. Williams. The aims of the Atlas of Islamic Merv project.

4.4.2 The aims of the Atlas of Islamic Merv project

Characterising and understanding the spatial organisation of early Islamic cities represents a major challenge for archaeologists and historians. Many of these cities are buried by later urban communities, leaving us to extrapolate from much later urban forms. Merv offers a rare opportunity to explore the nature of an early Islamic city, especially its floruit under the Seljuks (Williams forthcoming), and as such the emphasis of the Atlas project is to try to understand the broad structure and organisation of the urban space, rather than the specifics of individual property development (the latter perhaps best articulated through specific excavations). We hope to examine an 'archaeology of place' (Wheatley 2003), to explore theories of spatial organisation of the urban space as constituted through the action of knowledgeable agents: the intended and unintended consequences of human actions (Giddens 1984). Specific features that we might wish to identify, therefore, are:

public/communal versus private/domestic space – to enable an understanding of neighbourhoods, and social organisation/structuring of the urban space;
public/communal building functions – to enable an understanding of the structure of neighbourhoods, and the provision of services and facilities, and the central or diffused structure of the facilities;
unbuilt space outside private and public/communal building complexes – to enable an understanding of the nature of the built environment, the quantity of garden and other space, access, etc.

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