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Lauriya (district Champaran) contains, besides an inscribed
Asokan Pillar, fifteen stupa-mounds. Four of them were excavated in
1904-07 and as two of them yielded a deposit of burnt bones with charcoal
and a gold leaf with a mother-goddess figure (akin to the one from
Piprahwa), they were regarded by the excavator to be vedic burial tumuli.
As a result of their re-examination in 1935-37, they were definitely
recognized to be stupas of mud or mud-bricks with baked-brick revetments
(in two cases with actual brick-lining). They were regarded as roughly
contemporary with the Piprahwa Stupa on account of the analogous find of
the mother-goddess figure on the gold leaf.
Nandangarh, about 2 km, from the Asokan Pillar, represents a fortified
habitation-site. At one end of the site was excavated a large brick stupa,
reared up on multiple polygonal terraces with numerous re-entrant angles.
This edifice, of the early centuries A.D., is the earliest example of a
form of terraced stupa, which culminated in the celebrated monuments of
Paharpur in East Pakistan and Borobudur in Java, both dating from circa
A.D. 800.
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