Introduction

The Royal Workshops of the Alhambra Project was created with the aim of studying the urban area of the Alhambra, where substantial archaeological remains are still visible. The central role played by glazed ceramics in the material culture and political projection of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada (13th–15th centuries) and the plausible assumption that a good deal of luxury ceramic production took place in the palatial city, right under the gaze of the royal palaces, made the study of industrial remains in the Secano (the name now given to the urban sector of the hill) a very tempting proposition. It is well known that medieval Muslim rulers often encouraged the state sponsorship of craft activity as a way to create a recognizable material culture to represent their house or polity. We aimed to find those royal workshops and establish more firmly the technological knowledge and industrial prowess mobilized by the Nasrid rulers, which was at the forefront of their ideological and material strategies for survival in the convulsive Mediterranean of the Late Middle Ages.

As the reader of this volume may have figured out by now, very little has gone according to plan. Although there are very powerful reasons to still believe that the royal Nasrid workshops that we set out to find were once there, the incontrovertible fact remains that they are there no longer in the area that has been explored so far, at least not in any recognizable shape. There are Nasrid industrial remains, but they are so tenuous that taking their interpretation any further than we have done would be adventurous, to say the least.

Despite this, we are perfectly happy to say that, as far as we are concerned, the project has been a resounding success. This may sound a little eccentric coming from a project called the Royal Workshops of the Alhambra which has managed to find no royal workshops at all, in the Alhambra or elsewhere. Yet we stand by that conclusion, because the result of our research is that we now know a good deal more about the history and archaeology of the Alhambra than we did before we started.