A Consular Officer in Bushire, serving in Mesopotamia and Luristan during First World War, Edmonds was sent to Qazvin after the war. He witnessed the Jangal upheaval and the 1921 coup d Etat. The encounter with Persia of a well-trained and brilliant British agent.

Since Prehistory, communities principally engaged in herding activities have occupied the intermontane valleys and plains of the Zagros (Western Iran). Relations, tensions and cultural exchange between the inhabitants of the mountains and the Mesopotamian plains already occurred during the Bronze Age. These contacts increased in the course of the 1st millennium BCE, as is suggested by Near Eastern and subsequently by Greek and Latin sources which provide us with numerous new names of peoples living in the Zagros. The present volume investigates the social organisation and life style of the peoples of the Zagros Mountains in the 1st millennium BCE and deals with their relationships with the surrounding environment and with the political authorities on the plains. Among these peoples, for example, were the 'fierce' Medes, breeders and purveyors of fine horses, the Manneans, who inhabited a large territory enclosed between the two contending powers of Assyria and Urartu, and the 'warlike' Cosseans, who bravely attempted to resist the attack of Alexander the Great's army. The Southern Zagros Mountains, inhabited by mixed groups of Elamite and Iranian farmers and pastoralists, were also of key importance as the home of the Persians and the core area of their empire. Starting from Fars, the Persians were able to build up the largest empire in the history of the ancient Near East before Alexander. The interdisciplinary approach adopted in this study, which juxtaposes historical records with archaeological, zooarchaeological, palaeobotanical and ethnographic data, provides a new, holistic and multifaceted view on an otherwise little-known topic in ancient history.

The Zagros fold-thrust belt (ZFTB) extends from Turkey to the Hormuz Strait, resulting from the collision of the Arabian and Eurasian plates during Cenozoic times, and separates the Arabian platform from the large plateaux of central Iran. To the east a pronounced syntaxis marks the transition between the Zagros collision belt and the Makran accretionary wedge. In the ZFTB, the Proterozoic to Recent stratigraphic succession pile is involved in huge folds, and offers the opportunity to study the stratigraphic and tectonic evolution of the Palaeo-Tethyan margin. Few recent data were widely available on the southern Tethys margin preserved in the Zagros Mountains. The Middle East Basins Evolution (MEBE) program was an excellent opportunity to go back to the field and to collect new data to better constrain the evolution of this margin. In this volume the structure of the Zagros Mountains is explored through different scales and using different methodologies.

What is the important geologic information recorded in Thrust Belts and Foreland Basins (TBFB) on the evolution of orogens? How do they transcript the coupled influence of deep and surficial geological processes? Is it still worth looking for hydrocarbons in foothills areas? These and other questions are addressed in the volume edited by Lacombe, Lavé, Roure and Vergés, which constitutes the Proceedings of the first meeting of the new ILP task force on "Sedimentary Basins", held in December 2005 at the Institut Français du Pétrole, on behalf of the Société Géologique de France and the Sociedad Geologica de España. This volumes spans a timely bridge between recent advances in the understanding of surface processes, field investigations, high resolution imagery, analogue-numerical modelling, and hydrocarbon exploration in TBFB. With 25 thematic papers including well-documented regional case studies, it provides a milestone publication as a new in-depth examination of TBFB.