1. Introduction
During the early Islamic period, pottery was widely produced in Central Asia, especially at important urban centres such as Samarqand, Bukhara, Akhsiket and Termez in nowadays Uzbekistan (Shishkina, 1979; Shishkina & Pavchinskaja, 1992; Nekrasova, 1999; Mirzaakhmedov, 2003; Henshaw, 2010; Houal, 2008, 2013), Balkh, Lashkari Bazar, and Ghazni in Afghanistan (Gardin, 1957, 1963; Fusaro, 2014; Siméon, forthcoming), Hulbuk in Tajikistan (Siméon, 2009, 2012, 2013), and Nishapur in Eastern Iran (Wilkinson, 1973; Rante & Collinet, 2013). In most of these centres, the manufacture of Islamic glazed and unglazed vessels is dated since the 8th-9th centuries.
Archaeometric analyses on Central Asian Islamic pottery are scarce and mainly applied to coatings rather than fabrics. Moreover, in some cases, they are related to museums’ collections or pottery collected during surveys. Recent re...