The Temples of the Classical Kingdom of Bagan, Myanmar: The Bundling of Royalty, Religion, and People

Author(s): Ellie Tamura

Year: 2019

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Bagan was Myanmar’s political, economic, and cultural centre during the country’s Classical period (c. 800-1400 CE). Encompassing an area of 80 kilometers square, this landscape was home to approximately 4,000 brick monuments. These monuments were the result of the Buddhist pursuit of merit-making, the idea that individuals could obtain merit through acts of piety to increase their social status upon rebirth. For the kings of Bagan, this typically took the form of sponsoring the construction and maintenance of religious monuments. This paper explores how these monuments became nodal features in the landscape, bundling together economic, environmental, social, political, and religious systems and bonding the Crown, the Sangha (Buddhist Order), and the commoner population in a variety of enabling and constraining relationships. During the early Bagan period, these monuments mutually benefitted both the Crown and the Sangha as their construction stimulated the economy and encouraged social cohesion. By the mid-14th century, the Crown began to feel stress associated with state-sponsored monuments, so much so that this eventually contributed to the collapse of the empire. Although the Sangha was able to persist, it would never again experience the same potency that it had during this golden age.

Cite this Record

The Temples of the Classical Kingdom of Bagan, Myanmar: The Bundling of Royalty, Religion, and People. Ellie Tamura. Presented at The 84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Albuquerque, NM. 2019 ( tDAR id: 451544)

Spatial Coverage

min long: 92.549; min lat: -11.351 ; max long: 141.328; max lat: 27.372 ;

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24032