The following Foreword, written by the three co-editors of this Handbook, situates the field of Islamic archaeology as it is practiced today in the larger study of the Islamic world. It also positions this Handbook in a growing body of scholarship on the archaeology of Islam. The special challenges faced by a newly emerging field, and one that is concerned with relatively recent historical periods and is quite literally global in scale, is presented in honest debate. The relationships of Islamic archaeology with Islamic art history and Islamic history are problematized, and the conceptual problems of Islamization and periodization explicated are and explored. The Foreword closes with a justification for the global scale of this Handbook, which determines its geographical organization
