IRANIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Year:2015 | Volume:12 | Issue:21|Papers Count:7

Limitation of water in Iran has resulted in developing well-elaborated rules for water exploitation throughout the history. Forming traditional farming units (boneh) are stemmed from the reality that except in one or two areas, water is the scarcest agricultural resource in Iran. Three important sources of water in Iran have been the aqueducts (qanat), the rivers, and the springs respectively. Each of these sources has associated with a complex regulation of their use for irrigation. This exploitation system consists of managing the water supply, the water distribution and transfer, and finally, managing the water usage. However, regarding the changes in the Iranian rural community after Land Reforms and the Islamic Revolution, the disruption of traditional systems of agricultural production such as boneh, and abolishment of the Khans' and the landlords' rule, the irrigation systems, too, underwent certain transformations. These changes include forming ham-ab groups among the farmers, which re-organized the previous rules and systems of water distribution in a new framework and cooperated in optimum use of water and improvement of agricultural lands.

Research on Iranian cuisine has mostly been focused on nutritive values and medical diets that typically can be found in antique Iranian medical texts such as "al-elm-al-aqḍia" or "al-alaj bel-aqḍia". However, few cultural, linguistic, anthropological or socio-historical researches have been done on Iranian crude or cooked foods. This research tries to study "Abgusht", an Iranian traditional food, that can be considered as "Persian pot-au-feu". It was an integral part of Persian cookery books and ones related to Iranian cuisine for more than six centuries. The import and cultivation of non-native species of vegetables(such as potato and tomato), industrial development, migration from rural to urban areas, formation of metropolitan areas, growth of working population, and translating European cookery books to Persian led to the gradual and natural evolution of Abgusht to a "fast food". This in turn caused persistence of Abgusht in the Iranian traditional cuisine menu.

The need for trading and weighing goods has made the scale one of the most important instruments of trading. If we consider counting as the first science of humankind and measuring as the second, the third one would be science of weighing. By increasing demand for weighing voluminous farming and ranching goods a need for a portable scale to be able to weigh heavy goods appeared. qapan was a scale without pan, which satisfied this need for centuries. qapan consists of a graded shaft with three hooks on it and a weight which moves across the shaft. One of the hooks is for hanging goods and two other (sar sabok and sar sangin) for holding the qapan. Inscribed grades on the shaft were based on tabriz's man (equal to 3 kg) and shahi's man (6 kg) and were subdivided to the smaller grades. Later, in Pahlavi era, the grading unit changed to the metric system. For weighing, the goods should be hung to the respective hook, and the weight should be moved on the shaft until the shaft becomes horizontally balanced; so the place of weight on the graded shaft shows the measurement. For this research, both archival and fieldwork studies have been applied and it is based on qajar and pahlavi qapans available in borkhar and esfahan anthropological museums. The article describes the various types of qapan, their parts and their use.

"Context" is a key theoretical and a neoteric concept that archaeology has adopted from other disciplines. Its usages and semantic scopes have gradually developed in both field studies and theory. In recent decades, the archaeologists have increasingly used this key concept both as a paradigm theory and as a practical principle in the field that defines their field approach, observations and exterior and inner descriptions (analysis, explanation, interpretation). In addition, the archaeologists have made new combination and derivative terms from the concept, and situate it in the archaeological semantic context.At the present, there is a consensus among the archaeologists that isolated study and observation of silent and diffused reminders of the cultural materials are not justified anymore. Instead, the archaeologists put emphasis on locating archaeological materials, data and evidence in their respective contexts. First, they should detect the hidden exterior and inner chains, and then reconstruct, explain and interpret them. This process of contextualization is a very important step toward a contextual archaeology.

The dry climate of Iran turns water as the most significant concern of agricultural livelihood in the country. Particularly, in eastern, southern and central areas of Iran which usually face water shortage problem accessibility of water plays a much more crucial role. This problem resulted in developing elaborated networks of irrigation and canals. In this paper, a traditional irrigation system in Illam province (case study: ivan-e qarb city) called "taq tao" (taqab) has been studies through fieldwork methods. The results show that prevalence of pastoral livelihood and dominance of dry-land farming have led to the decline of this irrigational system's development in the region. The existence of the permanent river of gangir and other water resources sufficient for dry farming land, and prevalence of animal husbandry over other forms of livelihood were the most important causes of the situation. Therefore, supplying and distributing water in this region became confined to using surface water suitable to general pattern of cultivation.

The procedure of modernization has caused economic, political and cultural changes and increased the extent of the individualization. Consequently, personal life has become a matter of choice and personal plans. These changes are not endemic in the urban centers; indeed, rural communities have also been affected so as the familial relationships in rural communities are now out of the control of social obligatory norms and turn into an optional action. Even though, Islamic values highly encourage the relationship with the kin and discourage breaking with them. This paper studies the changes in familial relationships in a rural community and tries to delineate the factors affecting them. Hesar Kharvan village in Qazvin province was selected to examine two families over three generations in terms of relationships. To do this, the life history method was used to study the evolution of family relationship with a retrospective approach. The results indicate that the political changes along with economic and social change, have been effective in these transformations. These political and social changes in the country since last few decades caused a significant decrease in Hesar Kharvan Village family relationships. This situation has brought about such consequences as the spread of individualism, the importance of money and luxuries, the importance of personal decisions, decreased cooperation, aspiration for communication with the people in urban areas, lack of attention to indigenous knowledge, reduce of the paternal authority, and little attention to the elderly in the family.