Christians and Muslims, ruptures and continuities in material culture

Undertaken in 2010 and 2012, the archaeological works in the building known as «Casa da Severa», in the heart of Lisbon’s Mouraria, provided access to a ceramic ensemble very well defined chronologically, between the 11th and 15th centuries, that is, during the entire time period in which the Islamic community of Christian Lisbon inhabited this space of the city, until its expulsion in 1497.In this set, some formal and stylistic prevalence of the Islamic pottery tradition are notorious, and there is even a coexistence of some differentiation between the Christian taste then prevailing in the rest of the city, and the simultaneous maintenance of typological and decorative solutions typical of the previous period. The richness of this group also makes it possible to assess the socio-cultural relations that linked the Islamic and Christian communities, even in terms of the immaterial.