The P. E. MacAllister Field Archaeology Award is conferred every year by the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR), a nonprofit organization with over 50 institutional and some 2,000 individual members. It was set up to study the history and culture of the Near and Middle East and share its findings with the general public. Bethany J. Walker has made a major contribution to advancing research in this field through her many years of work on agrarian societies and migration in the Mamluk period and on environmental and agricultural history.
Professor Walker studies the agency of dependent social groups in terms of negotiating advantages, establishing niches or scope for autonomy for themselves and making decisions at local level that had the potential to influence the empires of the day. In political terms, her research focuses on the Mamluk Sultanate, a Muslim state covering Egypt and Syria that a political elite comprised of freed slave soldiers founded in the 13th century and continued to rule until the early 16th century. Under this system, a particular form of slavery that was deep-rooted in the medieval Islamic world created a ruling elite. Farmers, poor people, foreigners, religious minorities and women were able to redefine their social class as they saw fit by shaping the economic institutions and imperial policy and forming alternative socio-political networks.
Professor Walker has so far published a monograph, seven edited volumes, seventy-nine articles and nineteen reviews, with a second monograph—a final report on her excavations in Jerusalem that will include contributions from project workers and experts—set to follow in 2024.
The Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) Cluster of Excellence
“Asymmetric dependency”—with this new guiding concept, the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) Cluster of Excellence is offering a new route to accessing slavery and dependency research. Up until now, the academic discourse has been skewed toward either the Americas or the time of antiquity. This new approach offers it a broader conceptual framework, as the cluster will be studying all forms of deep social dependency such as slavery, serfdom, debt bondage and other kinds of permanent dependency relationship and covering all time periods, regions and cultures. Broadening its perspective in terms of content, space and time in this way will open up dependency research to transcultural comparison.