It is a book of more than 250 photographs of sculptures and shrines within 57 chapters, each accompanied by explanatory texts (300 to 2000 words each) introducing village temple sites with 8th-13th century sculptures. The villages included are in south Bihar around Gaya, Bodh Gaya, Nalanda and Rajgir, as well as a selection of rarely documented village shrines of north Bihar (Mithila), in Begusarai, Darbhanga and Madhuvani districts. In Orissa, village sites visited were in Puri, Cuttack, Jaipur, Baleswar, Mayurbhanj, and Khorda districts. The majority of the photographs were taken by the author in 2016-17 while conducting research in eastern India, along with a supplementary group of comparative photographs taken at some of the same sites in 1989-90.