Maṇḍala is a
Sanskrit word that means "circle". The
mandala is a model for describing the patterns of diffuse political power distributed among
Mueang or
Kedatuan (principalities) in early Southeast Asian history, when local power was more important. The concept of a mandala counteracts modern tendencies to look for unified political power, i.e., the power of large
kingdoms and
nation states of later history — an inadvertent byproduct of 15th-century advances in map-making technologies. In the words of
O. W. Wolters who further explored the idea in 1982:
The map of earlier Southeast Asia which evolved from the prehistoric networks of small settlements and reveals itself in historical records was a patchwork of often overlapping mandalas.