One of the lower-budget (Readers Digest) archaeology videos around here has a segment on the (successful) search for a former huge-ass city mentioned in Chinese annals and dating from somewhere in that prime period of 500 BC to 500 AD (and maybe a while thereafter), and gone without a trace. The archaeologist doing the modest dig found a motherlode of bones, identifiable Sri Lankan artifacts, and of course, loads of Buddhist stuff. Buddhism wasn’t all that popular in India, so it spread it out to keep from gettin’ killed. And none of them were vegetarians either (not even the Buddha, although he eventually stopped eating altogether, until he died for some reason), until sometime in the Middle Ages.