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New Publications

Posted On May 19, 2015 | 11:08 am | by meredithb | Permalink

Dumbarton Oaks is pleased to announce the arrival of two new publications: Food and the City: Histories of Culture and Cultivation, edited by Dorothée Imbert, and The Measure and Meaning of Time in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Anthony F. Aveni.

Food and the City: Histories of Culture and Cultivation explores the physical, social, and political relations between the production of food and urban settlements. Its thirteen essays discuss the multiple scales and ideologies of productive landscapes—from market gardens in sixteenth-century Paris to polder planning near mid-twentieth-century Amsterdam and opportunistic agriculture in today’s Global South.

The Measure and Meaning of Time in Mesoamerica and the Andes brings together specialists in anthropology, archaeology, art history, calendrics and astronomy, and the history of science to contemplate concrete and abstract temporal concepts gleaned from the ancient and contemporary cultures of the Central Mexicans, Mayans, and Andeans. Contributors first address how people reckon and register time; they compare the western linear, progressive way of knowing time with the largely cyclic notions of temporality derived from the Americas, and they dissect, explain, and explore the origins of the complex dynastic and ritual calendars of the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs. They subsequently consider how people sense time and its moral dimensions. Time becomes an inescapable feature of the process of perception, an entity that occupies a succession of moments rather than the knife-edge present ingrained in our Western minds.

Both books are available for purchase through our distributor, Harvard University Press.