This important new work, Buddhist Landscapes: Art and Archaeology of the Khorat Plateau, 7th to 11th Centuries (NUS Press, 2023) by Stephen Murphy, build on extensive fieldwork and archaeological surveys to reveal the Khorat Plateau as having a distinctive Buddhist culture, including new forms of art and architecture, and a characteristic aesthetic. By combining archaeological and art historical analysis with an historical ecology approach, Murphy traces the outlines of Buddhism’s spread into the region, along its major river systems. In this episode, hosted by Natali Pearson, Murphy shows how he has read this history into and against the Khorat landscape, attending to the emergence of monumental architecture such as stūpa, and Buddha images carved into the rockfaces of hills and mountainsides, and the importance on the Khorat Plateau of the use of boundary markers, or sīmā.

This book provides a new picture of the region in the first and early second millennia, adding to our understanding of the development of Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and offering a new basis for other regionally-focused scholarship to thrive —from textual Buddhology to history to anthropology. As Murphy explains, this opens up new possibilities for understanding the early spread of Buddhism within different landscapes across Asia.

Dr Stephen A. Murphy specialises in the art and archaeology of early Buddhism and Hinduism in Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and Malaysia. He is the Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology of Asian Art, and Chair of the Centre of South East Asian Studies, at SOAS University of London.

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