ABSTRACT
Colin MacKenzie and the Stupa at Amaravati
Jennifer Howes
Between 1816 and 1820, Colin MacKenzie (1754-1821) spearheaded the earliest comprehensive survey of a stupa site in India. The only remaining documentation of his pioneering investigations of the stupa at Amaravati is held in the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library (www.bl.uk/collections/amaravati/mackamaravati.html). The author begins by piecing together the history of the MacKenzie excavations, and viewing them within the context of excavations conducted later in the nineteenth century. She then considers how the MacKenzie excavations fit within the historiography of Buddhism and Jainism in the early nineteenth century. Finally, she looks at what happened to the sculpted stones excavated by MacKenzie and his team. In so doing, some of the stones recorded by MacKenzie's draftsmen can be traced to specific museum collections both in India and in Britain; most notably, the Amaravati sculptures in the British Museum that formerly decorated a monument in the market square of Masulipatam, in Andhra Pradesh.
Engraving showing three Amaravati stones discovered by MacKenzie and his survey team in 1978 (MacKenzie 1809: p.274).