ABSTRACT
The way in which the history of Indian Buddhism has been studied by modern scholars is decidedly peculiar. This peculiarity is most readily apparent in what appears at first sight to be a curious and unargued preference for a certain kind of source material. When Europeans first began to study Indian Buddhism systematically there were already two bodies of data available to them and the same is true today. Charles Thomas, one of the foremost figures in the archaeology of Early Britain, starts his book entitled The Early Christian Archaeology of North Britain with some important observations. Thomas's statements, taken from a work of historical archaeology published in 1971 by Oxford University Press, provide us with a startling example of how the assumption as to where religion is located neutralizes the significance of material remains and, ipso facto, the role of human behavior in the history of a religion.
