There are no specifically Buddhist archaeological remains contemporary with the Buddha’s lifetime. It is possible, however, to sketch some contextual archaeological features. There was an archaeological period of between eight and five hundred years between the Mohenjo Daro-Harappan civilization (c. 2400-1800 BCE), which spread along the Indus River Valley and into a considerable area of Northwest India and the rise of Gangetic sites in Northeast India. At present this period can only be characterized by phases of material culture - for example, the Chalcolithic and Iron Ages - and by specific pottery types. Two of these, in particular, are of great importance to India’s Iron Age and early historic archaeology to which early Buddhist archaeology belongs: the Painted Grey Wares [PGW] of western India c. 800-350 BCE, and the slightly later Northern Black Polished Wares [NBP]. Magadha in Northeast India was probably the core area in which NBP developed as an elaborate and highly distinctive form of early historic pottery. The production techniques and use of this ware gradually spread to all of northern India during the Mauryan period. Although there is at present no universal consensus among scholars about NBP chronology, the majority view assigns it to the period from c. 500-200 BCE. Thus it is a pottery associated with the developed Iron Age and early urbanization of Northeast India. In his lifetime, the Buddha would have used utensils made of both NBP and simpler ceramics, along with those of metal and wood. The processes of cultural contact, transport, and trade whereby NBP spread over the whole of northern India in the fourth and third centuries BCE are probably linked to the spread of Mauryan power at this time and of Buddhism from the third century BCE onwards. If the early history of Buddhism was deeply imbedded in Magadhan territory and the vicissitudes of Mauryan power, it later struck deep roots in other territories and polities inside and outside India.
All but one of the urban sites closely associated in the Discourses of the Buddha with his life and death have been identified and at least to some extent excavated: Lumbini (where he was born), Bodh Gaya (where he attained Enlightenment), Sarnath (where he began to teach the dhamma), Rajagrha, Sravasti, Kausambi, and Vaisali near or in which he sojourned and Kusinagara where he died and was cremated. Only Kapilavasthu (the capital of the Sakya oligarchy to which he belonged) lacks certain identification. All these sites lie within a fairly confined area of Northeast India, in territory that became the Magadha state. There are several reasons for the dearth of direct archaeological evidence from the time of the Buddha’s life: firstly only rammed mud, mud-bricks, timber, and thatch were in use as construction materials at this time (possibly also stone rubble in a mud matrix). These materials do not survive as a well-defined archaeological horizon, although future refinements of archaeological analyses may make it possible to trace them. Meanwhile, the presence (or absence) of NBP is often a valuable indicator of the age of a layer but provides only indirect evidence on Buddhist archaeology itself. The second reason for the rarity of direct evidence on the earliest phases of Buddhist archaeology is that all the sites associated with the Buddha’s lifetime became sites of renewed veneration and monumental construction as a result of the upsurge in Buddhism under the reign of the great Mauryan Emperor Ashoka (273-232 BCE) if not before. Archaeologists have generally been reluctant to disturb remains of the Ashokan era in order to investigate what may lie below them. The third reason is that in the period between the death of the Buddha and Buddhism’s resurgence under the Emperor Ashoka, it (like Jainism) was only one of several traditions of wandering ascetics in Northeast India, all of whom left no trace or only very faint traces in the archaeological record.
Before the revisions of the dates of the Buddha’s life and death already mentioned, there seemed to be a very long hiatus of some two centuries between the Buddha’s death and the earliest known archaeological remains of Buddhist sites. The revised dates, however, narrow the gap between the Buddha’s death in Magadha territory, c. 380 BCE and the beginning of the Mauryan power there in c. 328 BCE to some fifty years. Candragupta, the first Mauryan emperor, consolidated the nascent state forms of Magadha. The Mauryans probably learnt from the well-articulated state institutions of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, which included territories on the northwest frontier of South Asia. In 330 BCE, Alexander of Macedon defeated Darius III, the last Achaemenid Emperor and pursued his conquests into these Achaemenid territories. Thus the newly powerful Magadhan state - so significant for Buddhism - took shape under the challenges presented by the momentous events reshaping the history of the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia. Greek Satrapies established in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests renewed and redirected the long traditions of commercial and cultural exchange between South Asia, Western Asia and the Mediterranean that had existed since the Mohenjo Dara-Harappa civilization some two thousand years before. In Gandharan Buddhist art, these several traditions - Persian, Greek, and Indian - merged to produce some remarkable regional art styles.
World History
