Between Pollen, Tree Rings, and Isotopes: A New Material History of Sāmānid Transoxiana

This paper explores how paleoclimatology and isotopic studies of coins are transforming the study of medieval Central Asian history. It uses the Sāmānid amirate (also called a kingdom or empire in older literature) during the tenth century as a case study. This period has long been seen as one of Central Asia’s numerous “golden ages,” immortalized by the poetry of Rūdakī and philosophy of Avicenna. As a result of the scientific revolution in historiography, paleoclimatology and isotopic analysis are changing the shape of Sāmānid history in fundamental ways. The paper will first explore how tree-ring and lake sediment records are influencing the agricultural history of the Amu Darya, Zarafshan, and Syr Darya watersheds. This new historical evidence shows that a drought, peaking in the 960s through 980s, stressed local water systems across western Central Asia. The paper will then analyze how isotopic research has changed the study of Sāmānid minting and mining. The main finding of the presentation is that older approaches (that draw on textual records in Arabic, Persian, and Chinese as well as decades of Soviet archaeological study) are still required for contextualizing new evidence from the natural sciences. Although many texts related to this period are translated and well-studied, the Sāmānid case shows that medieval Central Asian history is not nearing “peak document” in terms of economic and environmental history. Textual approaches are not likely to decline in this subfield.