Carter's foreign policy: The perception of failure

Harold Brown, Thinking about National Security: Defence and Foreign Policy in a Dangerous World. (Westview Press, Boulder, 1982.)

Seyom Brown, The Faces of Power Constancy and Change in United States Foreign Policy from Truman to Reagan. (Columbia University Press, New York, 1983.)

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977–1981. (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1983.)

Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. (Bantam Books, New York, 1982.)

Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in America's Foreign Policy. (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.)     

Glacial Stratigraphy of the Upper Mersey Valley,Tasmania

The upper Mersey Valley was glaciated on three occasions during the Pleistocene. The youngest, Rowallan Claciation, probably commenced after 28000 years B.P. The maximum ice limit was attained before 13500 years B.P., and retreat occurred before 10000years B.P. Deposits associated with Rowallan Glaciation are weakly weathered chemically. They overlie moderately weathered deposits that were formed during the Arm Glaciation, which is inferred from relative dating data to have occurred before the Last Interglacial Stage. North of the deposits and ice limits of the Arm Glaciation extremely weathered tills and rhythmites occur. They were formed by ice of the Croesus Glaciation which is inferred to be of Early Pleistocene age or older.     

Book reviews

Barbara Harrisson. Pusaka: heirloom jars of Borneo. xvi, 55 pp., 142 plates. Singapore, etc: Oxford University Press, 1986. (Oxford Asia Studies in Ceramics.) £48.

E. E. van Delden (comp). Klein repertorium: index op tijdschriftenarti‐kelen met betrekking tot voormalig Nederlands‐Indië. Deel l. Tijdschrift voor het Binnenlandsch Bestuur, 1887–1900. 79 pp. Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, 1986. Guilders 40.     

Book reviews

Leonard Blussé. Strange company: Chinese settlers, mestizo women, and the Dutch in VOC Batavia . xiii, 302 pp. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1986. (Verhandelingen van het Kononklijk Instituut voor Taal‐, Land‐ en Volkenkunde, 122.) Guilders 35.

John S. Guy. Oriental trade ceramics in South‐East Asia, ninth to sixteenth centuries. With a catalogue of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai wares in Australian collections, xiv, 161 pp. Singapore, etc: Oxford University Press, 1986. (Oxford in Asia Studies in Ceramics.) £47.50.     

Hunter-gatherer adaptations and assemblage structure

There is a growing tendency to conceive of hunter-gatherer adaptations as points on a yardstick, with foragers at one end and collectors on the other. Such a view limits our perspective and may trap anthropologists into seeing these categories as steps in an evolutionary progression. It is more productive to think of human adaptation as an N-dimensional space, with individual cases occurring at the intersections of the various dimensions. When this viewpoint is taken, it becomes clear that a search for a single dimension in archaeological data that can be used to characterize all prehistoric adaptations is unlikely to be fruitful. This paper explores the multidimensionality of hunter-gatherer adaptive behavior and reviews those archaeological manifestations that are empirically or logically linked with various dimensions of three components of adaptation: mobility, predation, and technology. Those manifestations with the greatest potential for characterizing prehistoric hunter-gatherer adaptive strategies are identified as measures of mobility type, frequency, stability, scheduling, demography, and range; predation mode, breadth, and scheduling; and the time budgeting and storage dimensions of technology. A subset of these measures is evaluated by comparing assemblages from the late prehistoric Columbia Plateau with expectations derived from ethnographies written on the same local area.