Studies of Buddhist art have often relied on objects detached from their original contexts, preserved in museum collections or reproduced in art-historical corpora with limited archaeological provenance. While such material has been fundamental to the comprehension of artistic phenomena and the reconstruction of the broader history of Buddhism in a region, its decontextualisation has frequently reinforced centre–periphery models that privilege well-documented areas over regions known primarily through dispersed finds. Archaeological approaches grounded in systematic field survey, which document material culture in situ and at the scale of landscapes, offer a critical means of reassessing how Buddhist sites were distributed, how religious practices were embedded in local environments and how regional traditions developed beyond the boundaries of dominant centres. It is within this broader methodological and historiographical context that the present volume is situated. In Buddhist landscapes: art and archaeology of the Khorat Plateau, 7th to 11th centuries, Stephen Murphy focuses on a broad region encompassing north-east Thailand and central Laos that has long been marginalised in scholarship, overshadowed by studies of Dvāravatī culture in the Chao Phraya basin to the west and the Chenla and later Angkorian polities to the south and south-east. As such, the book represents a welcome and timely contribution to Southeast Asian archaeology.
The volume presents an impressive amount of art-historical and archaeological material, assembled during the author’s doctoral research and enriched by additional fieldwork conducted over the years. On the basis of this evidence, Murphy argues convincingly that the Khorat Plateau should be understood as a cultural unit in its own right, rather than a peripheral zone defined by its more extensively studied neighbours. Central to this argument is the identification of a distinct visual and material idiom, termed the ‘Khorat Plateau aesthetic’, which the author proposes as a defining feature of the region’s Buddhist culture.
Methodologically, the book is “primarily an archaeological study” (p.4), while drawing on a range of complementary approaches and bodies of evidence, including art-historical, epigraphic and textual sources. The corpus is comprehensive, encompassing a wide variety of site types (i.e. moated settlements, earthen mounds, mountaintop and hillside sites, as well as a number of poorly defined locations) and a diverse set of material assemblages, such as sīmā (stone boundary markers delimiting sacred space), stone and bronze images of the Buddha and bodhisattvas, votive tablets and inscriptions.
Analysis of the geographic distribution of material across the region identifies eight clusters of sites aligned with the three major river systems that structure the Khorat Plateau: the Chi, the Mun and the middle Mekong. Several observations follow from this spatial approach. Buddhism emerges primarily as a lowland phenomenon, closely associated with fluvial corridors, underscoring the importance of river systems and communication networks for the establishment and diffusion of Buddhist communities, a pattern well attested elsewhere in the Buddhist world. Building on this framework, the author undertakes a comparative analysis of iconography, narrative schemes and stylistic motifs carved on sīmā and other sculptural remains. These comparisons are used to reconstruct relationships between sites and to propose varying scales of political and religious organisation, pointing to hierarchical patterns of interaction and influence rather than isolated local traditions. Through this analysis, sites such as Muang Fa Daed emerge as pivotal within the Chi river system and, more broadly, as one of the most significant Buddhist centres on the Khorat Plateau, while Muang Sema—cautiously identified by the author with the seat of the ancient Śrī Canāśa/Śrī Canāśapura polity mentioned in epigraphic sources—assumes a comparable role within the Mun river system network. On this basis, the book delineates stylistic idioms specific to each river system and, taken together, articulates the defining features of what Murphy terms the ‘Khorat Plateau aesthetic’.
This spatial logic also provides the organising principle for the book’s main analytical section (Chapters 2–5), which discusses the three river systems—the Chi (Chapters 2 & 3), Mun (Chapter 4) and middle Mekong (Chapter 5). Each chapter situates the material within its geographic and, where possible, historical context, combining site-based discussion with close analysis of sculptural and, to a lesser extent, epigraphic assemblages to identify regional patterns. Within the Chi river system and particularly at Muang Fa Daed, the study highlights a distinct tradition of sīmā stelae characterised by the prominence of narrative reliefs, notably episodes drawn from jātaka tales and scenes from the Buddha’s final existence; this narrative emphasis contrasts with other clusters on the plateau, where non-figural motifs such as stūpa–kumbha and dharmacakra predominate. The Mun river system is instead marked by a high-quality bronze tradition centred on Buddha and bodhisattva images, while the middle Mekong network is distinguished by a sīmā tradition that combines narrative and non-narrative elements alongside a clear pattern of mountaintop retreat sites. Collectively, these regional idioms underpin the definition of a ‘Khorat Plateau aesthetic’, characterised by specific compositional strategies on narrative sīmā, distinctive modes of figural representation, such as the so-called drapé-en-poche, the recurrent association of Mahāparinirvāṇa imagery with elevated locations, and a bronze tradition that both draws on and transcends Dvāravatī and Khmer stylistic conventions.
The volume is particularly praiseworthy for its synthesis and presentation of a substantial body of previously unpublished and little-studied material, much of which will be of lasting value to scholars of Southeast Asian archaeology and Buddhist art. The richness of the dataset is supported by a well-designed format, including 15 maps and 95 figures, most in colour, as well as 11 tables in the appendix. These provide a concise and accessible overview of sites and associated material for each river system and cluster, while the detailed index further enhances the volume’s value as a reference work. This careful documentation and organisation make the book an important empirical resource for the study of Buddhist material culture on the Khorat Plateau.
At the same time, some conceptual issues merit further discussion. The term ‘workshop’ is used to designate two principal centres (Muang Fa Daed and Muang Sema) whose production is argued to have shaped material traditions in other clusters, yet the modalities through which models and motifs circulated between sites are insufficiently explored, leaving processes such as ‘symbolic entrainment’—a term borrowed from Colin Renfrew—analytically underdefined. Moreover, since these clusters also produced material that does not conform to the idioms associated with the proposed centres, they must themselves have functioned as loci of production, suggesting the need for a more fine-grained terminology to capture the diversity of production contexts and mechanisms of transmission. Relatedly, while the archaeological and art-historical analyses are carefully developed, some interpretive conclusions—particularly those concerning the circulation of narrative traditions, the interpretation of bodhisattva iconographies in relation to Mahāyāna or Vajrayāna Buddhism, the organisation of the saṅgha and the role of depictions of the Mahāparinirvāṇa in the construction of sacred geographies—would benefit from closer engagement with the wider scholarship in Buddhist studies. Such discussions, though not necessarily incorrect, at times remain schematic and risk oversimplifying complex doctrinal and institutional questions. These issues, however, do not detract from the book’s overall contribution, which succeeds in opening new avenues for research on a region long treated as peripheral.
