The beaches of the Indian Ocean stretch in a golden arc from the Atlantic to the Pacific, delimiting the entire southern boundary of the old world. On the lands adjoining this ocean and its inlets, almost every variety of human adaptation is or has been represented, as have the interactions between them. Societies of fisherman and pirates, hunters and gatherers, herdsmen and agrarian farmers, states and urban civilizations based on farming or trade, have all flourished at one time or another. Yet studies of the systems of the Indian Ocean before the spread of Islam remain in their infancy and until now the record on early Indian Ocean civilizations has been fragmented. The Indian Ocean in Antiquity brings together an international group of leading scholars to present, for the first time, a comprehensive view of the current state of research on the early populations of the area. After an introductory chapter, the twenty-six papers are grouped into four sections: The Environment and Natural Resources; The Early Civilizations; The Classical Period and Between Africa and China. They comprise the most far-reaching look at this vast region in pre-modern times that has ever been available. This pioneering volume makes an important contribution to the understanding of a region of great significance in world history, both past and future.Topics include: sea levels and other factors affecting coastal settlement; contracts between Mesopotamia and the Indus; Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian maritime activity; Roman interests in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean; the archeological evidence for early trade between South and Southeast Asia; the early settlement of Madagascar; the ethnographic evidence for long-distance contacts between Oceania and East Africa and recent discoveries of Christian and Hindu remains in Quanzhou.

Rivers are recognized as major natural resources, not only as sources of domestic, industrial and agricultural water and hydro-electric power, but also for food production and increasingly for recreation and tourist promotion. This awareness has led to increased study of lotic limnology, particularly with respect to the development of the potentials of river systems. The concern over deterioration of watercourses as a result of poor land utilization and their use as repositories for man's rejectamenta has stimulated research into the basic dynamics of the river environment and its biotic communities. Before any assessment of pollution effects can be made, or rational remedial action suggested, there must be a sound, detailed knowledge of the 'natural' characteristics of regional water courses as a reference standard. This knowledge can result only from investigating the whole drainage area as a unit ecosystem (E VANS 1956) rather than just the specific conditions in the river itself (cf. SLACK 1955, HYNES 1969). Biotic data for any stream are of little value if divorced from consideration of the geology, hydrochemistry, land use and nutrient cycles of the watershed that generated them. The study of large rivers, potamobiology in the sense of I LLIES (1955, 1961 a), is a specialized area of research merging into lenitic ecology in many aspects and cannot be considered here.