Buy Books: Browse by Season: Spring 2016

Useful for individuals reading any version of Piers Plowman, this engaging guide offers a much-needed navigational summary, a chronology of historic events relevant to the poem, biographical information about Langland and his work in context with his contemporaries, and keys to characters and to proper pronunciation.

Ritual and archaic states frequently ignite complex debates about their defining characteristics and archaeological signatures. Offering fresh perspectives on both subjects, this volume unites the two streams of scholarship and explores the varying nature, expression, and significance of ritual in archaic states.

Using extensive field research, Alconini explores the modes of direct contact between the Inkas and eastern tropical Lowland populations, a situation often overlooked in studies of the area. Combining both regional- and household-level perspectives, she explores the empire's impact on local settlements as well as on domestic economy, production, cultural materials, and labor organization.

Nineteenth-century Spanish American writers reimagined gender roles, modernization, and national identity during Spanish America’s uneven transition toward modernity. This ambitious volume surveys an expansive and diverse range of countries across the nineteenth-century Spanish-colonized Americas, showing how both men and women used the discourses of modernity to envision the place of women at all levels of social and even political life in the modern, utopian nation.

Assessing sites both submerged and on land, the authors explore the maritime history of the isthmus through its many stages: from its prehistoric period through Spanish colonialism to the building of the canal and its function as a route for modern-day maritime traffic.

In this volume, Christina Conlee documents the cyclical rise and fall of societies in the region, with particular focus on the development of the Nasca culture, its subsequent conquest by the Wari state, followed by collapse and abandonment, and then the establishment of a new society in the Late Intermediate Period.