South Asian archaeology surveys and excavates the material culture and monumental remains of the Indian subcontinent from prehistory through its historic Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and later periods, cross referenced against inscriptional and textual evidence where it survives. The discipline's founding institution is the Archaeological Survey of India, established in 1861 under Alexander Cunningham, a British army engineer turned archaeologist who had already begun identifying and mapping Buddhist sites described in Chinese pilgrim accounts, giving the subcontinent for the first time a sustained, systematic program of archaeological survey rather than isolated antiquarian collecting.
Cunningham's early surveys located and identified major Buddhist sites, including Sanchi and Sarnath, using the fifth century Chinese pilgrim Faxian's and the seventh century Xuanzang's travel accounts as a guide, work that recovered physical evidence for the geography of early Buddhist practice independent of and predating any surviving continuous local tradition at many of those sites. The atlas relies on South Asian archaeology's excavated chronology wherever a subcontinental tradition's site history or monumental record needs dating independent of later devotional or nationalist retelling.