Directors and Designers explores the practice of scenography—the creation of perspective in the design and painting of stage scenery—and offers new insight into the working relationships of the people responsible for these theatrical transformations. With contributions from leading practitioners and theorists, editor Christine White describes the way in which the roles of director and designer have developed over time. Featuring chapters on theater and site-specific performance, theatrical communication and aesthetics, and the cognitive reception of design by the audience, this volume provides a valuable resource on current approaches to scenography for professionals and students.

Modes of Spectating investigates the questions posed by new artistic and technological mediums on the viewer experience. These new visual tools influence not only how spectators view, but also how what they view determines what artists create. Alison Oddey and Christine White analyze how gaming and televisual media and entertainment are used by young people, and the resulting psychological challenges of understanding how viewers navigate these virtual worlds and surroundings. This multidisciplinary approach brings together ideas and examples from gaming art, photography, sculpture, and performance; it will be a valuable text for scholars of both media and art.

The collapse of classic Maya civilization at the end of the eighth century A.D. is still an enigma, but the story behind it is likely more than a clash of warring city-states. New research indicates that ecological degradation and nutritional deficiency may be as important to our understanding of Maya cultural processes as deciphering the rise and fall of kings.

Reconstructing Ancient Maya Diet integrates recent data from bone-chemistry research, paleopathology, paleobotany, zooarchaeology, and ethnobotany to show what the ancient Maya actually ate at various periods (as opposed to archaeological suppositions) and how it affected the quality of their lives. It is now evident that to feed a burgeoning population the Maya relied on increasingly intensive forms of agriculture.

Exploring the relationship between these practices, ecological degradation, and social collapse, this book uses dietary data to investigate the rise of agricultural systems and class structure; the characterization of social relationships along lines of gender and age (i.e., who ate what); and the later effects of the Spanish conquest on diet and extant modes of agriculture.

Maya subsistence has been investigated intensively for the past two decades, but this is the first volume that unites work across the spectrum of Maya bioarchaeology.