Book reviews

Iran's Foreign policy 1941–1973: A Study of Foreign Policy in Modernizing Nations. By Rouhollah K. Ramazani. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1975. xiv + 507pp. $20.

Israel and Iran: Bilateral Relationships and Effect on the Indian Ocean Basin. By Robert B. Reppa, Sr. New York: Praeger, 1974. 187pp. $16.50.

Iran at the End of the Century: A Hegelian Forecast. By Robert E. Looney. Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, D. C. Heath, 1977. 155pp.

Mirza Malkum Khan: A Biographical Study in Iranian Modernism. By Hamid Algar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973. 327pp.

From Darkness into Light: Women's Emancipation in Iran. By Badr ol‐Moluk Bamdad. Edited and translated by F. R. C. Bagley. Hicksville, New York: Exposition Press, 1977. 140pp. $8.00.

Love and War: Adventures from the Firuz Shah Nama of Sheikh Bighami. Translated from the Persian by William L. Hanaway, Jr. Persian Heritage Series No. 19. Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1974. 208pp.

Malayer und sein Umland: Entwicklung, Structur und Funk‐tionen einer Kleinstadt in Iran. By Mostafa Momeni. Marburg/Lahn: Marburger Geographische Schriften, Heft 68, 1976. 208pp.

The Qashqa'i Nomads of Fars. By Pierre Oberling. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. 277pp.     

Friendly Relations: Situating Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic, 1780–1830

Men and women who became friends in the early American republic struggled with societal worries about the purity and chastity of their friendships. More so than other pairs of friends, heterosocial friends had to attend to how their friendships appeared to those around them. One of the most important ways of doing so was positioning a friendship in relation to spouses. In an era when marriage was the central structure for relations between men and women and fears of seduction and ruin were rampant, friends of the opposite sex needed to integrate their friendships within their marriages. This paper examines how men and women did so through the lens of their correspondence. Navigating a society without clear boundaries or rules for conducting a friendship between a man and a woman, individual pairs of friends improvised to create safe friendships in person and in letters. The careful intertwining of marriages and friendships they created demonstrates the way intimate social relationships were embedded in the social fabric of the early American republic.     

The Huldremose Iron Age textiles,Denmark: an attempt to define their provenance applying the strontium isotope system

Archaeological textiles recovered on two occasions from the Huldremose bog, Denmark, represent some of the best preserved and complete garments from the Danish Iron Age (500 BC–AD 800). In order to address the question regarding the provenance of the textile's raw material, we applied a recently developed method based on strontium isotopes to wool and plant fibres from these ancient garments. Textile plant fibres from Huldremose I find are of non-local provenance, whereas the wool from which the garment was made stemmed from sheep grazing on glaciomoraine soils developed on Cretaceous–Tertiary carbonate platform sediments widely found in Denmark. The Huldremose II find consists of an unusually large and well preserved garment, which is composed of wool from at least three different provenances. One source is again local, whereas the other two sources, characterized by elevated ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios, are compatible with geologically older (Precambrian) terrains which are typical for Northern Scandinavia, e.g. Norway or Sweden. Our study suggests that wool and plant fibres were either traded or brought as raw materials for textiles more commonly and over longer distances than previously assumed.     

What is on the craftsmen’s menu? Plant consumption at Datrana,a 5000-year-old lithic blade workshop in North Gujarat,India

The exploitation of lithic resources was an important aspect of prehistoric resource exploitation strategies and adaptation. Research has mostly focused on technological and spatial aspects of lithic factory sites, often overlooking how these sites were integrated within local socioecological dynamics in terms of food acquisition and consumption. The aim of this paper is to study plant consumption at Datrana, a 5000-year-old lithic blade workshop in North Gujarat, India, in order to understand its occupants’ subsistence strategies. The results of archaeobotanical, mineralogical and soil pH analyses show that the occupants of this factory site were consuming local crops but not processing them, suggesting that either (a) food was being processed in other areas of the site or (b) it was acquired in a ‘ready-to-consume’ state from local food-producing communities. This study highlights the integration of a lithic factory site within its surrounding cultural and natural landscape, offering an example of how the inhabitants of a workshop interacted with local communities to acquire food resources.