This study strives to understand Islamicisation from a social point of view, rather than related only to the religious conversion or to a set of specific Islamic material manifestations. A historical context is considered as a case study. The period of the Islamicisation in the Vega of Granada (south east Spain) lasted from the 8th to the 11th centuries CE. The process of social change in this context is described using a combination of historical and archaeological sources, and then insights are made on the relation of such changes with the form of Islam that was adopted. The results point to two distinctive periods that are related with a different form of Islam and therefore, arguably, with two different islamicisations.

Studying the pottery produced in the Granada region between the eighth and eleventh centuries AD, the author describes a changing discourse of Roman and Islamic forms. This in turn can be held to reflect the changing social relations between conquerors and conquered.

This article presents a brief overview of archaeological studies on the pottery produced and used during the eighth century, the period immediately after the conquest of al-Andalus. It demonstrates that in spite of valuable advances in the field, scholars have been limited in their considerations of the impact of post-conquest Muslim immigration upon ceramic production because of two main factors. The first is an excessive reliance on a flawed theory, namely that eighth-century ceramics were ambiguous, that is, typologically undefined ceramics, embedded in the transition between the Visigothic Kingdom and the Caliphate. The second is a lack of an appropriate methodology, a result of the particular development of the field of medieval pottery studies in Iberia, which has favored approaches that fail to account for a period of time during which changes in pottery manufacture were fast and primarily unrelated to the scale of production or the degree of specialization of the artisans. Consequently, the impact of post-conquest immigration of Muslims on ceramic production has been understudied. This article proposes to show how a different theoretical and methodological stance in the study of early Islamic ceramics can help to elucidate this impact and lend support to an alternative narrative of the emergence of al-Andalus.