Abstract
The rapid Arab-Islamic conquest during the early Middle Ages led to major political and cultural changes in the Mediterranean world. Although the early medieval Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula is now well documented, based in the evaluation of archeological and historical sources, the Muslim expansion in the area north of the Pyrenees has only been documented so far through textual sources or rare archaeological data. Our study provides the first archaeo-anthropological testimony of the Muslim establishment in South of France through the multidisciplinary analysis of three graves excavated at Nimes. First, we argue in favor of burials that followed Islamic rites and then note the presence of a community practicing Muslim traditions in Nimes. Second, the radiometric dates obtained from all three human skeletons (between the 7th and the 9th centuries AD) echo historical sources documenting an early Muslim presence in southern Gaul (i.e., the first half of 8th century AD). Finally, palaeogenomic analyses conducted on the human remains provide arguments in favor of a North African ancestry of the three individuals, at least considering the paternal lineages. Given all of these data, we propose that the skeletons from the Nimes burials belonged to Berbers integrated into the Umayyad army during the Arab expansion in North Africa. Our discovery not only discusses the first anthropological and genetic data concerning the Muslim occupation of the Visigothic territory of Septimania but also highlights the complexity of the relationship between the two communities during this period.
Highlights
The rapid expansion of the Arab Empire during the Muslim conquests resulted in the formation of one of the most important empires in world history, extending from the west bank of the river Indus to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean (Fig 1)
Burials with identical shapes were recorded in the early Middle Ages in the northwestern Mediterranean area—i.e., Spain (e.g., [6]), Portugal [30] and Sicily [31]—and they have been systematically interpreted as Islamic graves
The funerary practices observed in Nimes, in particular for the position of the body, are very close to those observed in necropolises dated from the Conquest in the Iberian Peninsula [32,33,34]
Summary
The rapid expansion of the Arab Empire during the Muslim conquests resulted in the formation of one of the most important empires in world history, extending from the west bank of the river Indus to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean (Fig 1). The Umayyad army invaded the Iberian Peninsula via North Africa in 711 AD and rapidly conquered the Visigothic kingdom, which, from the 5th to the 8th centuries AD, spread across what are southwestern France and the Iberian Peninsula. Archeological data have highlighted peculiar burial practices that clearly correspond to Muslim practices [5,6,7,8] These specific practices (including, for example, the systematic deposit of bodies on the right-hand side and oriented toward Mecca) demonstrate that Islamic-style graves appear to have persisted from the medieval period to the present day [9,10]. This study doesn’t document the first Muslim occupation, the data provide persuasive evidence of an African maternal contribution in this historic sample (20% of mitochondrial lineages), a contribution that is, interestingly, still seen in the extant populations of the region (at lower frequencies, ; [12])
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