Introduction. The archaeology of Buddhism has been portrayed as the excavation of individual monuments and the chronological review of regional style. Reports focus on isolated monuments, and practitioners expose only the brick or stone walls of monuments. Technical studies relate architectural phasing to the exclusion of associated ceramic, small find, and specialist analyses, and there is a divergence of technique when comparing the excavation of Buddhist monuments and prehistoric sites. As a result, scholars in other disciplines rely on textual sources purporting to represent the social and economic context of early Buddhism rather than trying to interpret the results of excavations. This reliance is by no means new, as colonial pioneers also utilized archaeology to provide evidence for assumptions based on those early textual sources. Many early encounters were amateurish, but their founding assumptions persist, limiting the sophistication of our understanding of early practice. Ho...
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