About

Lars E. Fogelin is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. His research encompasses archaeological theory, the archaeology of Indian Buddhism, and the material expression of religion and ritual in past societies. Fogelin's work emphasizes understanding long-term religious change through practice theory, materiality, and semiotics, with particular focus on Buddhist archaeological remains, architecture, iconography, inscriptions, and historical sources. He has authored books such as 'An Unauthorized Companion to American Archaeological Theory' and 'An Archaeological History of Indian Buddhism,' which explore archaeological practices, social contradictions within Buddhist communities, and the evolution of Buddhist ritual and material culture from the 6th century BCE through the 2nd millennium CE. His research investigates how material practices, such as the manipulation of stupas and the construction of Buddhist monasteries, reflect and influence religious and social dynamics. Fogelin's work also includes methodological contributions to the archaeology of religion, emphasizing the use of multiple perspectives and approaches to understand ancient religious practices and their material remains.

Research topics

• Archaeology
• History

Selected publications

• Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing Supplemental Materials

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-01-14

  articleOpen access

  These are the supplemental materials for Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing, to be published as a Forum on Public Anthropology in Current Anthropology in February 2026. Abstract: Disseminating research is a key component of scholarly labor, but the costs and benefits of the current structure of academic publishing are underexamined within anthropology. This paper brings together a range of authors from across archaeology and cultural anthropology to summarize current issues in archaeological publishing and offer potential interventions at multiple scales. The paper is divided into five core topics.“ Ideology” discusses the relationship between publishing and academic history, gatekeeping, and the ideology of collaboration and coauthorship.“ Publishing Dynamics in North America” covers intersections between identity, authorship, and citation practices, as well as gendered patterns in publishing. “Publishing Dynamics in Latin America” presents a case study of academic publishing in Brazil and Peru, highlighting the unique challenges for archaeologists based in the Global South. “Publishing Pathways” interrogates open science and data, standards for peer review and coauthorship, and the impact of different publishing models on individual researchers. Finally,“Media Coverage” investigates bias in popular media covering archaeological research and the monetization of scientific information. We conclude with a list of multiscalar interventions for authors, peer reviewers, editors, journals, departments, institutions, and granting agencies that will improve conditions for authors and readers, emphasizing strategies that lead to collaborative, reciprocal forms of knowledge production.

  PublisherDOI

• Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing Supplemental Materials

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-01-14

  articleOpen access

  These are the supplemental materials for Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing, to be published as a Forum on Public Anthropology in Current Anthropology in February 2026. Abstract: Disseminating research is a key component of scholarly labor, but the costs and benefits of the current structure of academic publishing are underexamined within anthropology. This paper brings together a range of authors from across archaeology and cultural anthropology to summarize current issues in archaeological publishing and offer potential interventions at multiple scales. The paper is divided into five core topics.“ Ideology” discusses the relationship between publishing and academic history, gatekeeping, and the ideology of collaboration and coauthorship.“ Publishing Dynamics in North America” covers intersections between identity, authorship, and citation practices, as well as gendered patterns in publishing. “Publishing Dynamics in Latin America” presents a case study of academic publishing in Brazil and Peru, highlighting the unique challenges for archaeologists based in the Global South. “Publishing Pathways” interrogates open science and data, standards for peer review and coauthorship, and the impact of different publishing models on individual researchers. Finally,“Media Coverage” investigates bias in popular media covering archaeological research and the monetization of scientific information. We conclude with a list of multiscalar interventions for authors, peer reviewers, editors, journals, departments, institutions, and granting agencies that will improve conditions for authors and readers, emphasizing strategies that lead to collaborative, reciprocal forms of knowledge production.

  PublisherDOI

• Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing

  Current Anthropology · 2026-02-01

  article

  Disseminating research is a key component of scholarly labor, but the costs and benefits of the current structure of academic publishing are underexamined within anthropology. This paper brings together a range of authors from across archaeology and cultural anthropology to summarize current issues in archaeological publishing and offer potential interventions at multiple scales. The paper is divided into five core topics. “Ideology” discusses the relationship between publishing and academic history, gatekeeping, and the ideology of collaboration and coauthorship. “Publishing Dynamics in North America” covers intersections between identity, authorship, and citation practices, as well as gendered patterns in publishing. “Publishing Dynamics in Latin America” presents a case study of academic publishing in Brazil and Peru, highlighting the unique challenges for archaeologists based in the Global South. “Publishing Pathways” interrogates open science and data, standards for peer review and coauthorship, and the impact of different publishing models on individual researchers. Finally, “Media Coverage” investigates bias in popular media covering archaeological research and the monetization of scientific information. We conclude with a list of multiscalar interventions for authors, peer reviewers, editors, journals, departments, institutions, and granting agencies that will improve conditions for authors and readers, emphasizing strategies that lead to collaborative, reciprocal forms of knowledge production.

  PublisherDOI

• Brad H. Koldehoff & Timothy R. Pauketat (ed.). 2018. Archaeology and ancient religion in the American Midcontinent. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press; 978-0-8173-1996-0 hardback £34.

  Antiquity · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Archaeology

  Brad H. Koldehoff & Timothy R. Pauketat (ed.). 2018. Archaeology and ancient religion in the American Midcontinent. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press; 978-0-8173-1996-0 hardback £34. - Volume 94 Issue 374

  PublisherDOI

• Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia. Himanshu Prabha Ray. New Delhi: Routledge India, 2018. 140 pp., 12 figures, bibliography, index. Hardback £95, US $150, ISBN 978-1-138-30489-5; eBook £36, US $49, ISBN: 978-0-203-72854-3.With Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia, Himanshu Prabha Ray h

  ScholarSpace (University of Hawaii at Manoa) · 2019-10-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  With Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia, Himanshu Prabha Ray has produced the first modern introduction to the field intended for an audience of non-specialists. Coming in at a brief 140 pages, Ray has provided an excellent primer for anyone who is seeking to gain an understanding of the basic outlines of Buddhist archaeology in South Asia. To accomplish this, Ray jettisoned the traditional ways of presenting Buddhism that have dominated scholarship for the last century. Where earlier works would almost invariably begin with the biography of the Buddha, the archaeological sites he is believed to have visited, and a survey of the role of Buddhism in the development of urbanism from mid- to late first millennium B.C.E., Ray centers her book on the lived practice of Buddhists in the first millennium C.E.—the first period in which abundant archaeological remains are available to understand the growth, transformation, and eventual decline of Buddhism in South Asia. It is difficult to think of a better scholar to write this concise introduction to South Asian Buddhism. Since the publication of Monastery and Guild: Commerce under the Satavahanas (1986), Ray has been among the most important and prolific scholars working in ancient Indian history and archaeology. Through her work at Jawaharlal Nehru University and as Chair of the National Monuments Authority, she has helped shift the focus on Buddhist history and archaeology from one that concentrated on Buddhist theology and philosophy, primarily through close readings of [End Page 404] Buddhist texts, to a perspective on the daily lived practices of Buddhist monks and nuns (collectively known as the sangha) and the elite and non-elite lay people who supported them. This new perspective, one that Ray helped create, permeates the whole of Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia.

  Publisher

• Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia by Himanshu Prabha Ray

  Asian perspectives · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia by Himanshu Prabha Ray Lars Fogelin Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia. Himanshu Prabha Ray. New Delhi: Routledge India, 2018. 140 pp., 12 figures, bibliography, index. Hardback £95, US $150, ISBN 978-1-138-30489-5; eBook £36, US $49, ISBN: 978-0-203-72854-3. With Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia, Himanshu Prabha Ray has produced the first modern introduction to the field intended for an audience of non-specialists. Coming in at a brief 140 pages, Ray has provided an excellent primer for anyone who is seeking to gain an understanding of the basic outlines of Buddhist archaeology in South Asia. To accomplish this, Ray jettisoned the traditional ways of presenting Buddhism that have dominated scholarship for the last century. Where earlier works would almost invariably begin with the biography of the Buddha, the archaeological sites he is believed to have visited, and a survey of the role of Buddhism in the development of urbanism from mid- to late first millennium b.c.e., Ray centers her book on the lived practice of Buddhists in the first millennium c.e.—the first period in which abundant archaeological remains are available to understand the growth, transformation, and eventual decline of Buddhism in South Asia. It is difficult to think of a better scholar to write this concise introduction to South Asian Buddhism. Since the publication of Monastery and Guild: Commerce under the Satavahanas (1986), Ray has been among the most important and prolific scholars working in ancient Indian history and archaeology. Through her work at Jawaharlal Nehru University and as Chair of the National Monuments Authority, she has helped shift the focus on Buddhist history and archaeology from one that concentrated on Buddhist theology and philosophy, primarily through close readings of [End Page 404] Buddhist texts, to a perspective on the daily lived practices of Buddhist monks and nuns (collectively known as the sangha) and the elite and non-elite lay people who supported them. This new perspective, one that Ray helped create, permeates the whole of Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia. Perhaps the most important aspect of Archaeology and Buddhism in South Asia is its emphasis on the diversity of Buddhist practices, whether speaking of the sangha or the laity. More so, rather than present the sangha and the laity as wholly separate, Ray carefully demonstrates the ways that their religious practices and beliefs both diverged and overlapped over time. Ray tracks these issues in five chapters, each focusing on a different theme. In the first two chapters, she examines the spread of Buddhism throughout South Asia, primarily in terms of how specific Buddhist sects competitively expanded into new areas while simultaneously developing the core concepts of the Buddhist dhamma (a difficult term to define, but sometimes glossed as "law" or "teachings"). Rather than a unified, generic form of dhamma, Ray stresses the differences between the 16 sects of Buddhism and the importance of inscriptions for understanding the lived practices, both ritual and otherwise, of the sangha. Overall, Ray credits Buddhist sangha with the spread of Buddhism from its heartland in the Gangetic Plain of North India. In chapters 3 and 4, Ray turns her attention to Buddhist relics, icons, and associated ritual practices and pilgrimages centered on the relics and icons. In a critical move, Ray argues (p. 3), The physical manifestations of the dhamma appeared in the archaeological record as religious architecture at least 200–300 years after the Buddha had preached his dhamma across north India, and especially important are the inscriptions, stupas, images, and other objects of veneration. The key insight here is that the material expressions of Buddhism are no less expressions of the dhamma than the canonical texts that have long been the focus of research. In terms of relics, Ray argues for the centrality of relic veneration in the ritual lives of both the sangha and lay-Buddhists. More so, she sees the frequent disinterment, division, and reinterment of relics in new regions as central to the spread of Buddhism across South Asia. Within this context, the Buddha's relics were viewed as the living presence of the Buddha, and devotees...

  PublisherDOI

• Tibetan Mani Stones and the Materiality of Text

  The 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Delegitimizing religion: The archaeology of religion as. .. archaeology

  2016-01-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Consolidation and Collapse of Monastic Buddhism

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015-03-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract By the end of the first millennium ce, Buddhist monasteries in the Gangetic Plain and Northeast India had become large, politically powerful institutions with massive landholdings that provisioned thousands of cloistered monks, nuns, and novitiates. The sangha practiced a scholastic form of Buddhism, studying Tantric texts that included frequent examples of monks who abandoned the communal life for a life in the forest. To a large degree, these were romantic visions, though some small number of Buddhist monks might have actually abandoned monasteries for an ascetic life at the margins of Indian society. Divorced from the day-to-day concerns of the Buddhist laity, Buddhist monasteries were particularly vulnerable to invasions of North India by Central Asian Turks in the early second millennium ce. With their lands and wealth taken, most Buddhist monasteries in India were abandoned in the thirteenth century ce, with Buddhist pilgrimage centers similarly abandoned within a few centuries.

  PublisherDOI

• Rites of Passage and Other Rituals in the Life Histories of Objects

  Cambridge Archaeological Journal · 2015-05-12 · 25 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the last few decades, archaeologists have increasingly studied the material expression of religion. At the same time, they have recognized that some objects are animate in ways similar to people. Building on previous research that combines studies of religion, object agency and behavioural perspectives, we present an approach that focuses on the variety of rituals, especially rites of passage, in which objects participate over the course of their life histories. Occurring in societies at all levels of organizational complexity, rites of passage offer archaeologists an opportunity to contribute to the anthropology of ritual and an understanding of the ways that some objects take on, or are given, attributes of life. More subtly, by comparing the rites of passage of objects and the people who interact with them, we can assess differences in the specific qualities of object and human agency. These approaches may help us to orient the search for archaeological evidence of rites of passage as well as to interpret enigmatic deposits such as caches, hoards and offerings.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael Brian Schiffer

  1 shared