The earliest Buddhist shrine: excavating the birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini (Nepal)

Robin Coningham, Kosh Prasad Acharya and their co-authors are archaeologists, and this peer reviewed article in the journal Antiquity reports their excavation identifying the earliest structural shrine beneath the Maya Devi Temple at Lumbini, the Buddha's traditional birthplace in Nepal. Its strength is that it is peer reviewed field archaeology with stratigraphic and radiocarbon evidence, published in a leading archaeology journal, establishing the earliest known Buddhist shrine at the site. Its limit is that it dates a structure at the traditional birthplace, it does not itself settle the separate historical question of the Buddha's own birth date or the reliability of the site's identification, so a claim resting on those wider questions needs additional sources.