Written sources on Thai history are scarce. It took Hiram Woodward many years of painstaking archaeological and art-historical research to finally piece together this first ever comprehensive survey work on the art and architecture of Thailand from the earliest times until the establishment of the Thai-speaking kingdoms.

The book, organized geographically and chronologically, covers four eras: the prehistoric period; the period characterized by the culture of the kingdom of Dvaravati; the centuries of Khmer dominance; and, as classical Khmer civilization waned, the period of the struggle for identity.

A systematic and elucidating history of pre-fourteenth-century Thailand in a volume indispensable to historians of art, religion, politics, and society.

Readership: All those interested in early Southeast Asia and in understanding the surviving sculpture and architecture produced in Thailand before 1300.

About the Author

Hiram Woodward, Ph.D. (1975) in History of Art, Yale University, is the Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Quincy Scott Curator of Asian Art at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. He is the author of The Sacred Sculpture of Thailand: the Alexander B. Griswold Collection, (the Walters Art Gallery, 1997).