Habermas and Iranian Intellectuals

In this paper, we discuss the impact of Jürgen Habermas' ideas on Iranian intellectuals who live in Iran. The upshot of the paper is that in present day Iran, where the society is going through a significant transitional period, various intellectual groups have reacted differently towards the ideas of the German philosopher-sociologist. While the orthodox left-wing (ex-Marxist) intellectuals and the conservative right-wing writers have, by and large, tended to ignore his views, a younger generation of the left-wing intellectuals and a number of the Muslim intellectuals with left-wing/socialist tendencies, have tried, each in their own ways, to ‘adopt’ Habermas' ideas in pursuit of their own projects/research programs.     

Review Article: Nationalisms,National Identities and Nation States: Gendered Perspectives

Books reviewed in this article: Nira Yuval‐Davis, Gender & Nation Lois West (ed.), Feminist Nationalism Rick Wilford and Robert L. Miller (eds.), Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Politics of Transition Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict     

Gazetteer of small‐scale monuments in prehistoric Hadramawt,Yemen: a radiocarbon chronology from the RASA‐AHSD Project research 1996–2008

This paper provides a new, interpretive gazetteer and chronology of Hadramawt’s highland monuments based on results from archaeological survey and test excavations by the RASA‐AHSD (Roots of Agriculture in southern Arabia‐Arabian Human Social Dynamics) Project. With the exception of a few incidental sightings and an unpublished pipeline survey, the prehistoric record of southern Yemen’s highland plateau has been largely unknown. There are few settlements, so that understanding human landscape history must begin with the numerous small‐scale stone monuments left by mobile people. With examples representing monuments from the fifth, fourth, third and first millennia BC, the corpus of small excavations and radiocarbon dates reported here provides the first guide to the monument types of South Arabian highlands. Monument building began under more moist conditions and appears to have commemorated animal sacrifices long before commemorating mortuary rites and interment. There appears to be a temporal break of 1000 years before the widespread and varied practices of Bronze Age tomb construction, which lasted through the third millennium BC. After another break in monument construction, tombs were reused in the first millennium BC, sometimes with successive ritual visits. The data presented offer new material for the interpretation of the lives and activities of prehistoric pastoralists throughout the Holocene.     

Exceptional preservation of a prehistoric human brain from Heslington,Yorkshire, UK

Archaeological work in advance of construction at a site on the edge of York, UK, yielded human remains of prehistoric to Romano-British date. Amongst these was a mandible and cranium, the intra-cranial space of which contained shrunken but macroscopically recognizable remains of a brain. Although the distinctive surface morphology of the organ is preserved, little recognizable brain histology survives. Though rare, the survival of brain tissue in otherwise skeletalised human remains from wet burial environments is not unique. A survey of the literature shows that similar brain masses have been previously reported in diverse circumstances. We argue for a greater awareness of these brain masses and for more attention to be paid to their detection and identification in order to improve the reporting rate and to allow a more comprehensive study of this rare archaeological survival.