# Pia Brancaccio: Cave Monasteries and the Cotton Road in Western Deccan Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-ho-center-for-buddhist-studies-at-stanford-7277833/pia-brancaccio-cave-monasteries-and-the-cotton-road-in-western-deccan Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-ho-center-for-buddhist-studies-at-stanford-7277833/pia-brancaccio-cave-monasteries-and-the-cotton-road-in-western-deccan.md Podcast: [The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-ho-center-for-buddhist-studies-at-stanford-7277833) Published: 2025-06-01T07:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://ho-center-for-buddhist-studies-at-stanford.captivate.fm Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/ce9e2c0e-e5b4-46a2-8d17-41ed5996da31.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-ho-center-for-buddhist-studies-at-stanford-7277833/episodes/pia-brancaccio-cave-monasteries-and-the-cotton-road-in-western-deccan Duration seconds: 3058 ## Resource Pia Brancaccio talks about the Buddhist cave monasteries of Western Deccan, the inter-continental exchange of "Maritime Buddhism" along the "Cotton Road," and the competition between Buddhism and Shaivism at the end of the first millennium C.E. Pia Brancaccio is currently a Professor of Indian Art and Archaeology at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” in Italy and at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Her research focuses on early Buddhist art and cross-cultural exchange in South Asia, with a regional emphasis on the visual cultures of ancient Gandhāra (Pakistan) and the Deccan Plateau (India). She has published extensively on the Buddhist caves in the Western Deccan, including a monograph,  The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad  (2010), and the edited volume  Living Rock  (2013). She is currently working on the MAK Project (Mapping Ancient Kṛṣṇagiri) at the Kanheri caves in Maharashtra, India, which aims to produce the first complete archaeological and epigraphic documentation of the site. She has also been a longstanding collaborator with the ISMEO-Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan and has written on architecture, visual narratives, artistic workshops, and the multicultural fabric of Buddhism in Gandhāra. She co-edited the book  Gandharan Buddhism: Art, Archaeology  (2006). Interview by Miles Osgood. ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-ho-center-for-buddhist-studies-at-stanford-7277833/episodes/pia-brancaccio-cave-monasteries-and-the-cotton-road-in-western-deccan/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-ho-center-for-buddhist-studies-at-stanford-7277833/pia-brancaccio-cave-monasteries-and-the-cotton-road-in-western-deccan.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.