Books published by Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection

Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch assembles back together from clues and pieces a book that had disappeared from our library of Greek and Roman works. It shows how people in the distant past thought about their own history and how they discussed political and social issues across a seemingly insurmountable divide in a period of existential crisis.

Waves of Influence brings fresh attention to connections among regions often seen as isolated from one another. Drawing upon recent models of globalization alongside methods such as computer simulation and iconographic analysis, authors present individual case studies to demonstrate how each region participated in its own distinct network.

This new edition of the Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks joins Farrand¿s text explaining the reasoning behind her plan for each garden with Kavalier¿s commentary that provides context for changes that have affected new plant choices for the gardens. New and historical photography show the gardens in their current beauty and as they were conceived.

Pre-Columbian Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador: Toward an Integrated Approach presents current research on the prehispanic indigenous peoples in the lands between Mesoamerica and the Andes. Specialists have contributed to this illustrated book on topics ranging from historical and theoretical perspectives to reports on recent excavations.

This authoritative commentary is the most comprehensive examination to date of the bilingual riddle tradition of Anglo-Saxon England and its links to the wider world. A companion to The Old English and Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition, this volume includes rich notes and commentary on hundreds of Latin, Old English, and Old Norse¿Icelandic riddles.

The Conquered probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems composed soon after the conquest of Constantinople and Tenochtitlán. These texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic, and articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.

The Industrial Revolution is seen as a turning point in the emergence of the metropolis. But, as Landscapes of Preindustrial Urbanism shows, features associated with contemporary urban landscapes can also be found in preindustrial contexts. A group of essays examine how clusters of agrarian communities evolved into the earliest cities.

Sacred Matter: Animacy and Authority in the Americas examines animism in Pre-Columbian America, focusing on how objects and places played central social roles in practices that expressed and sanctified political authority in the Andes, Amazon, and Mesoamerica.

Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City brings together specialists in art and archaeology to develop a synthetic overview of the urban, political, economic, and religious organization of Teotihuacan, one of the major cities of Classic-period Mesoamerica.

The essays in this volume reconsider from a variety of vantage points an early collaborative project of Dumbarton Oaks, which brought together a philologist, an art historian, and an architectural historian to reconstruct their own version of the Church of the Holy Apostles.

Jean-Marie Morel's Théorie des jardins is a fundamental 18th-century text in landscape architecture. A renowned landscape designer and theorist with an engineering background, Morel took account of natural processes that underlie landscape formation and coined the term architecte-paysagiste, the precursor to "landscape architect."

Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice address the traditions, circumstances, and practices that involved the burning of bodies and bone, to better understand the ideologies behind these acts. It brings together scholars working across Mesoamerica with different methodologies and interdisciplinary lenses.