Lost Civilization?

Al-Andalus, the Iberian-Islamic civilization of 711-1492, is a "lost civilization" in that it is lost within a historiographic tradition that privileges Latin Christian and Gothic traditions and in that it has been excluded from the national narratives of Portugal and Spain, according to Boone (anthropology, U. of New Mexico), who goes on to note that it is also lost in a second sense because of its uniqueness, being too "Eastern" for traditional European medievalists and too "Western" for traditional Middle Easternists. However, more recent years have witnessed greater attention to Al-Andalus in the fields of history and archaeology. In this work, Boone summarizes the debates in these fields concerning the transition between late antiquity and medieval Islamic Spain and Portugal, generally from his point of view as an archaeologist. He relies on mostly primary publications concerning the archaeological evidence and mostly secondary sources within the field of history. Distributed in the US by International Publishers Marketing. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)