ABSTRACT
The tremendously rich cultural heritage of South Asia is rooted in its landscape to an extent rarely acknowledged by contemporary heritage discourse in the region. The dichotomy between tangible and intangible heritages has privileged material objects over the less-visible processes of production, technologies and skills that went into their making (Ruggles and Sinha 2009). Monumental architecture has been the focus of preservation efforts for more than a century and a half, although the logic of its spatial forms and structures, its construction technologies, and modes of inhabitation in the past are largely forgotten. The largest lacuna has been the severing of historic connections between the building and the landscape and the loss of appreciation of how building structures responded to site ecologies (Sinha 2010).
