The Art and Architecture of Thailand: From Prehistoric Times through the Thirteenth Century.

• Author: Brown, Robert L.
• Position: Book review

The Art and Architecture of Thailand: From Prehistoric Times through the Thirteenth Century. By HIRAM WOODWARD. Handbook of Oriental Studies, section 3: South-East Asia, vol. 14. Leiden: BRILL, 2003. Pp. xix + 275, plates, figures, maps.

Hiram Woodward notes in his preface that he has been working on this book on and off for about twenty-five years. It shows. It is a book that really only Woodward could write. The book demonstrates a complete mastery of an enormous corpus of art and architecture, and the use of an extensive corpus of scholarly references and often abstruse and rare textual sources. This is not to say that this will be the last word on the topic of art and architecture in Thailand. Quite the opposite, as it is better to see it as setting up something of a reconsidered beginning for future scholars.

Woodward's topic is the art and architecture found in what is today Thailand up until around A.D. 1300. The Thai first appear in history in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the art found in Thailand before this date is associated with non-Thai ethnic and linguistic groups, two of the most important being the Khmer and the Mon. Thus, the book deals with material and cultures associated with non-Thai ethnic groups that cut across modern nation-state borders. Considering the cultural sensitivity and political implications of what is and is not part of the national identity of Southeast Asian states today, an awareness of the complex interplay of ancient cultures across mainland Southeast Asia cannot be stressed enough.

The book is organized into four chapters: (1) the prehistoric period, (2) the first millennium A.D., (3) Cambodian expansion (tenth to twelfth centuries), and (4) creating a new order, focusing on Jayavarman VII's reign (r. 1181-ca. 1210) and what followed in the thirteenth century leading up to the coming of the Thai. The book attempts to create what might be called a stylistic geography. Woodward believes, correctly I think, that each art object participates in a stylistic lineage, so that an object can be traced back to other objects with which it shares stylistic features, creating a web of interrelationships. His job is to recreate this web. Because art objects, and obviously architecture, have a geographical character--they are made in a specific place by someone who usually lives in that place--geographical sites become nodes on the stylistic web: a style and a place usually simply overlap. The third...