Author Description

"This volume addresses a subject central to both world archaeology and trans-cultural art history. Landscape has been a key theme in the last half-century at least in both disciplines, particularly in the study of painting in art history and in all questions of human intervention and the placement of monuments in the natural world, within archaeology. However, the representation of landscape has been rather less addressed in the scholarship of the archaeologically accessed visual cultures of the ancient world. The kinds of reliefs, objects, and paintings discussed have a significant purchase on matters concerned with landscape and space in the visual sphere but were discovered within archaeological contexts and by means of excavation. Through case studies focused on the invention of wilderness imagery in ancient China, the relation of monuments to landscape in ancient Greece, the place of landscape painting in Mesoamerican Maya art and the construction of sacred landscape across Eurasia between Stonehenge and the Silk Road via Pompeii, this book emphasizes the importance of thinking about models of landscape in ancient art and also the value of comparative approaches in underlining core aspects of the topic. Notably it focuses on questions of space, both actual and conceptual, including how space is configured through form and representation"--Publisher's description.