After the fall of the Soviet Union, fifteen new states became independent. Of these, Tajikistan was easily among the most artificial, not because of its population, but because of its position tucked away on the western side of the Pamir Mountains with none of the historically Tajik cities included within its borders. The country suffered through a brutal civil war that lasted until 1997, then the people had to begin the long process of adjusting to their new reality as an entity apart from the Soviet Union on which they had become so dependent. This process has caused Tajiks to undergo many adaptations in their society, culture, and economy. Many of these changes involve painful economic choices that underscore the de-modernization and loss of support previously provided by the central government in Moscow. The fieldwork for this study centered around a single valley, the Hisor Valley of southern Tajikistan which extends from the capital of Dushanbe westward to the border with Uzbekistan. Starting with agriculture, easily the most important economic activity within the Valley, the largest employer, and the central part of most of the inhabitants' lives, and encompassing the extensive irrigation systems, inclusive of both older pre-Soviet systems and Soviet era construction, I shall show how changes in land tenure, environment, pastoralist activities, and machinery loss have affected the lives of Tajiks and their society. From this beginning, I shall show the new visions and ideas the people and the country as a whole display vis-à-vis civil society, the Tajik language, the place of Islam, and the geopolitical situation of Tajikistan. Since September 11, 2001, this region has taken on new meaning for the rest of the world and particularly the United States. Awareness of this society on the northern border of Afghanistan, that shares many of the same ethnic and cultural complexities of that country, will better aid academics and non-academics alike in navigating the new challenges facing not just these countries, but the world at large. Though slightly less divided ethnically than Afghanistan, Tajikistan still is a Muslim nation on the brink of economic ruin, and as such presents a model of a nation state that could again turn down the same path as Afghanistan into chaos and warfare as well as an area that could fall prey to Islamic extremism if the situation is not turned around. Understanding the reality for the people of the country is the first step towards realizing the work that is needed so desperately in comprehending not only the beauty of Central Asia, and by extension the Middle East, but also the importance it has today to the world at large. / text

Interpretation of seismic profiles, earthquake fault-plane solutions, radar images, and geometry of structures suggests that two different structural styles are viable alternatives for the Putumayo basin in Colombia. An eastern domain, varying in width from 4 to 13 km, might be characterized by strike-slip faulting parallel to the Andes because it exhibits similar structures to those formed in restraining bend settings, an example is the Orito fold, the largest known oil field in the basin. Correlation of seismic reflections with wells into the Orito fold and foreland indicates a post-Miocene age for this structure. Previous interpretations of contractional dip-slip movement on Andes-parallel structures, as proposed by Portilla (1991) with faults involving basement, are also viable. A 15 km-width western domain is interpreted as a region of foreland-dipping rocks uplifted above their regional level by wedging of pre-Cretaceous (?) rocks beneath known Jurassic rocks. Above the Jurassic rocks thin-skinned deformation occurs inside of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic sedimentary cover, also in the form of wedging. Mesozoic and Paleozoic (?) rocks were injected into of a late Cretaceous-early Paleocene unit composed of shale. The western domain is truncated to the west by a major reverse fault that places Paleozoic rocks over Mesozoic and Cenozoic rocks. / text

This item was digitized as part of the Million Books Project led by Carnegie Mellon University and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Cornell University coordinated the participation of land-grant and agricultural libraries in providing historical agricultural information for the digitization project; the University of Arizona Libraries, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Office of Arid Lands Studies collaborated in the selection and provision of material for the digitization project.

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