Potts declares at the outset of this authoritative volume that his primary goal is to refute the common assumption that nomadism and its associated characteristics carved continuous and similar patterns into the social and physical landscape of Iran throughout the last several millennia (pp xiii–xv). As indicated by the book’s title, Potts undertakes this task by presenting a diachronic study of archaeological and textual sources related to nomadic peoples from the prehistoric periods through to the modern day. The first chapter is of most interest to archaeologists as it engages with anthropological definitions of nomadism and pastoralism (pp 2–4) and deconstructs arguments fuelled by scant archaeological data and ethnographic parallels for the existence of nomads as far back as the Neolithic period. The second chapter introduces the Iranians themselves through a discussion on the introduction of the horse to the region, a fundamental factor in both sedentary and nomadic life from the early first millennium bce onward (pp 119, 189). This chapter synthesises zooarchaeological data with philological and textual evidence, serving as an effective bridge to the later historical chapters and highlighting Potts’s overall approach of exploring all possible disciplinary avenues in building his argument. In the third and fourth chapters, Potts mines the Classical and Late Antique sources for a better understanding of how their authors perceived those they saw existing beyond their settled society, so-called ‘nomads’ and ‘kurds’ (p 420). Though Potts does touch on possible stereotyping in these texts (p 117), he does not apply the same degree of source criticism to them as to the archaeological data. Future studies would benefit from a thorough investigation of particular terms and descriptors in the Mesopotamian, Classical and Late Antique sources.

The next three chapters, 5–7, emphasise the impact that nomadic groups had on the Iranian landscape and its inhabitants. Potts rightly points out that small numbers of nomads, as in the case of the Bedouin Arabs, could produce a ‘saturating effect … on the environment and social fabric of the country’ (p 186), albeit different from that of the large-scale incursions of later groups such as the Oghuz and Mongols. Indeed, Potts’s analysis of the historical events and actors involved from the eleventh-century infiltration of the Oghuz Türkmen up to the ‘third wave’ (p 224) of Türkmen culminating in the Safavid dynasty (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), underscores the full spectrum of nomadic cultures. Though these chapters offer a thorough overview of the political history of Iran during this time, their strength lies in dismantling assumptions that nomadism and its effects on settled populations remained stagnant over long periods of time. As in Chapter 1, Potts demonstrates that ethnographic parallels project a false image of nomadic societies as monolithic in their overarching characteristics. Nomads could be viewed by outsiders as the ‘wandering herdsmen’ tribes listed by Herodotus (Chapter 2) or the ‘wild <and bestial> Mongols’ described by the thirteenth-century monk Grigor of Akanc‘’ (p 188).

The last two chapters, 8 and 9, detail the shift of this outsider perspective on nomads inward as they document the tumultuous relationships between nomadic groups and centralised powers both in Iran and abroad. The photographs of Qashaq’i and other nomadic groups from the mid-twentieth century in these chapters balance the overall narrative of the book back toward nomads themselves as opposed to external sources from Mesopotamia, the Classical world or Europe. The modern perseverance and adaptations of nomadic groups in the face of suppressive tactics such as sedentarisation from the early twentieth century onward (pp 346–8, 403–6) again speaks to the dynamism found within the nomadic lifestyle and should alter the way that anthropologists and historians define ‘nomad’, both now and in the future.

Nomadism in Iran should serve both as an encyclopaedic collection of textual sources for those wishing to build upon Potts’s work and as a launching pad for further discussions on the characteristics of nomadism in broader geographical and disciplinary spheres. His interdisciplinary approach to the story of Iranian nomadism should benefit students and scholars from several different fields and appeal to historians of both the ancient and modern worlds. Though Potts deconstructed previous arguments for nomadism in prehistoric Iran, archaeologists and anthropologists working on questions concerning nomadism in both Iran and other regions can use this work as another tool to bolster their analytical methods and engagement with ethnography. Scholars invested in excavating nomadic sites should not view this book as defeatist toward identifying nomads in the archaeological record, but as a reminder that both pastoral and settled communities can interact, overlap in numerous permutations or not exist at all in particular historical contexts.