Early Buddhist Architecture in Context: The Great Stūpa at Amarāvatī (ca. 300 BCE-300 CE)

Akira Shimada's book is a welcome and timely addition to the nearly two centuries of research on the Amaravati Mahastupa (great stupa), and a more recent but expanding literature on the archaeology of early historic South Indian Buddhism. The study of this remarkable Buddhist monument presents a rather unique case for archaeologists, epigraphers, and social, religious, and art historians. Once a massive and beautifully adorned stupa, built and maintained by generations of early South Indian Buddhists, it was abandoned sometime during the fourteenth century a.d.