Re-centring Sistan: Archaeology in an epic land Professor Alka Patel, University of California, Irvine
Event details
Islamic Art History Network Lecture
The region of Sistan, straddling southwest Afghanistan and southeast Iran, seems to have fallen off the proverbial map due to decades of reduced or no accessibility to researchers and travellers alike. Its absence in scholarly discourse belies its historical significance, evidenced in the epic literature of both the Iranian and Indic worlds, and in images and descriptions of its vast archaeological remains. Combining “legacy data” such as historical photographs and archaeological field notes with new applications of satellite imagery, this presentation aims to re-center Sistan as the axis of encounter among religions, languages and political systems throughout the last two millennia.
This free event is funded by the History of Art Department and the Public Lecture Fund of the University of York, and is an Islamic Art History Network event.
About the speaker
Alka Patel is Professor in the Department of Art History and in the PhD Program for Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from Harvard University (2000). Patel's research has focused on South Asia and its connections with Iran and Central Asia, including overland and Indian Ocean maritime networks. Her works include Building Communities in Gujarat: Architecture and Society during the Twelfth-Fourteenth Centuries (Brill 2004), Communities and Commodities: Western India and the Indian Ocean, for which she was guest editor of a special issue of Ars Orientalis XXXIV (2004). Patel also guest-edited Archives of Asian Art LIX (2007), a special issue on reuse in South Asian visual culture. Patel’s interests have expanded to include mercantile networks and architectural patronage in 18th-19th-century South Asia, as evidenced in Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition (co-ed. K. Leonard, Brill 2012). Her recent volume India and Iran in the Longue Durée (Jordan Center for Persian Studies, 2017), co-edited with ancient Iranist Touraj Daryaee, resulted from an international conference convening a wide array of specialists analyzing Indo-Iranian connections over two millennia. Her current monographic project on the Ghurids of Afghanistan and northern India comprises two volumes, the first of which was published in late 2022.