Lumbini has better early documentary evidence than almost any sacred site anywhere, and a recent excavation that has been widely over-reported.
The pillar
The Ashokan pillar, rediscovered in 1896, carries an inscription recording that Ashoka came in person in the twentieth year of his reign, worshipped, and exempted the village from tax, because the Buddha was born here.
That is a third-century BCE inscription naming the place at the place. Almost no sacred site in any tradition has anything comparable. It establishes beyond argument that Lumbini was identified as the birthplace within about two centuries of the traditional date, which is not the same as establishing that he was born there, but is a great deal more than most sites can offer.
The 2013 excavation
Work led by Robin Coningham, published in Antiquity in 2013, dug beneath the brick shrines inside the Maya Devi temple and found timber structures on the same alignment, with an open central space. Radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating placed activity in the first millennium BCE, potentially as early as the sixth century.
This was reported worldwide as archaeological proof of the Buddha's birth date.
What it actually shows
It does not show that. Two questions have to be kept apart:
- Was there human activity at this spot in the first millennium BCE? The excavation supports yes.
- Was that activity a Buddhist shrine? That is an interpretation, and it is disputed.
The timber structure could be an early shrine. It could also be an earlier tree shrine of a non-Buddhist kind, or a structure unrelated to religion. The dating of the Buddha's own life is itself unsettled, Heinz Bechert's reassessment moved the consensus for the death substantially later than the traditional 483 BCE, towards around 400.
The excavators were more careful than the coverage. The stronger claim should not be repeated as settled.
The zone
UNESCO inscribed the site in 1997 and the Lumbini Development Trust administers it. The master plan, designed by Kenzo Tange, divides the monastic zone deliberately: Theravada monasteries to the east, Mahayana and Vajrayana to the west, some two dozen built by different countries in their own national styles.
Shops, hotels and restaurants are excluded from the zone entirely, so the commerce that surrounds every other major pilgrimage site is here zoned out by design.