SOAS Research Online

Abstract

A major challenge to achieving an archaeology of landscape is matching hard material facts with textual sources. This paper attempts to redress the balance between the two in Lower Myanmar studies. The archaeological evidence is favoured, but without losing the unique value of what is conserved in the epigraphic and chronicle tradition.Archaeological artefacts such as laterite walls and finger-marked bricks are difficult to tally with descriptions of cities and places found in inscriptions, chronicles and early Chinese travellers' accounts. Likewise,persons and places not mentioned in inscriptions are often deemed not to have existed. Both these approaches, in the self-imposed restrictions placed on their use of the evidence, prejudice investigation from the outset. This has particularly been the case in relation to texts demonstrating integration of monastic groups into early first millennium AD walled sites located in Lower Myanmar.