 As Nathan said, I am an archaeologist. I'm kind of stepping out of my wheelhouse a little bit here because he was very kind to me earlier where he said, well, we think of you, we Tibetologists think of you as a Tibetologist. And I kind of go, uh-oh, that might or might not be good. I'm not sure because I don't do the language. I used to do archaeology on the Tibetan Plateau until relatively recently, but that became very difficult for foreigners, so I no longer work there. So we were able to then move into Mustan in the fringe of the Tibetan Plateau, which made all the difference in the world in terms of permits. And so we're working in the Tibetan world, but in a very different capacity with the cooperation of the government rather than the active resistance to foreign archaeologists being present in the region. So you'll see that the title is a little tiny bit different than the title that might have advertised this lecture. You'll notice there's a question mark at the end of that. And the reason why is because I believe that I have some artifacts that are certainly Buddhist-like, not being a specialist in Indian Buddhism, being the archaeologist that I am. I have interpretations of them that I'll share with you. And you can tell me if I'm wrong. And I really don't mind. That's what we are here for, is to exchange ideas and to get new concepts going and to be told. And I was really stupid. Don't think that way. Please don't be so brutal if that's the way you feel about it. But in any case, I'll try to give you a good reading on why I think the materials that we have are Buddhist in nature, even though the dates that I'm showing you here are relatively early, as far as Nepalese Buddhism goes. And I'll have an explanation about all I think they got there, which may or may not be correct, but it's the best one I can offer at this point based on the material culture and my own reading of the way in which these things have moved around the landscape in the past. So with that background in mind, we all see images like this in our work somewhere. Buddhism starts here. And then the arrows send you off in different directions with different time frames. And this one is showing where the Buddhism supposedly went up until about 600 AD or so. You'll notice one area that it eludes entirely is most of Nepal. That is, the arrows don't go up into any place into the Himalaya from, at least from the south. If you're going anywhere, it simply goes around the edges. Here's another image that does a little better. It's got a blue arrow that's coming out of somewhere in India and going across the Himalayas into the Tibetan plateau. But again, this one is kind of unsatisfactory too. I mean, I don't mean to make too much of these. That is, these are really didactic things just to get people to think about space and movement of people. But what I really like to emphasize is that what I'm trying to get across in aspects of today's lecture is really all about a didactic, not a didactic, but I kind of think about an embodied approach to this. That there are people on the landscape. And there are people that have objects that I'll be talking about and they put them into context that were somewhat surprising. And so the question is, if they're Buddhist, how do they get them, where do they come from, what did they mean to them? I don't mean that I'll be able to answer that question in any kind of significant detail. I'm no mind reader of the dead in the past nor the present for that matter. But my point is that if we think about it as an embodied process, that is, of people moving around the landscape or moving ideas around the landscape, then what we can do is have a better understanding of what these objects might in fact mean in the distant past of this region. So where I'm gonna take you then is in Upper Mustang in Nepal. And if you look, there's a little montage. Some of you may have been there. I know you've been there. Times Christian is back in the background. Anybody else been to the montage? Okay. Oh, you have. When'd you go? The first time in 2008. Okay. And recently you took place down in both of these. Okay. Very good. Well, I'm no order story in either, but you know, I don't do those things, but you can see where I'm going with this. So there's a little montage. And if you go a little bit further to the north and to the east in this case, over the big ridge, you go to a little place called Samzong. And Samzong is a small village that had, at one time, a fairly large Buddhist era archeological, Buddhist era site on it. It's now a small village that actually has picked itself up and moved to the other side of the ridge that you climb over because they claim that their water is drying up and that the glaciers are melting inappropriately and therefore they have to leave. And so housing has been made for them on the other side of the river. But back in the day, the day I'm talking about between what, and roughly 500, 400 and 650 AD, this was a thriving community in this region. And one of the things that we focused our attention on in the work that we've been doing in Upper Mustang for the last 10 or 11 years now is we discovered this archeological site in Samzong. Now some of you, I don't know if, Christian, you've heard any of this before. Perhaps you have. I don't know, Jason, I don't know if you've heard any of it before either. So I apologize to those of you who've heard some of this, but apparently not enough of you have to worry about so I can then talk about this with some authority. So in any case, here's this location called Samzong. And this is a nice three-dimensional view of this place. And what you're looking at is a sheer cliff. And if you look carefully at the base of the cliff, you'll notice that there are large blocks of material that have fallen off the base. And those large blocks of material when they fell off exposed some holes that you see there in the side. And the local villagers would call these, well, you see the caves. Well, they're not really caves in this particular case, they're called shaft tombs. And what that means is that someone goes on a surface, walks to it, digs a tunnel down to whatever depth they feel like they're going, and then opens a chamber and then uses that chamber for some purpose. In this case, these were invisible as of late as 2009. That is, they were not there. No one knew their presence. What happened for us, fortunately was that there was a earthquake, a very small one, but enough to actually move the earth here. It shook off those big chunks of soil and laid them out so that when we walked up the valley the very first time in 2010, we saw them. And so we were able then to get inside them and to begin to work with them. There's 10 different shaft tombs here. They each have a set of numbers that we assigned to them sort of randomly, as you can see, just in terms of how we encountered them. You'll notice one thing about this. I'm not going to belabor the archeological part of this, but the only way you can work in this site is by hanging on ropes. That is, you have to actually use climbing gear, you repel, you do all those things that climbers do because there's no other easy access to these places right now. In the past, people would have walked up and not slip behind them, dug their shafts down into the soil and been there for use them for their purposes. So the two of these shafts that I'm going to talk about right now, oops, I'm sorry, are going to be number five and number four. It's actually number one and number four turned out to be connected. We didn't know that until we were really able to get inside it more carefully, more effectively, had four different chambers within it. So we were able to excavate the material fairly carefully from those. So these are then the two chambers that I'll be talking about for the remainder of this conversation. This is an image from National Geographic Magazine that was published back in, I believe, 2011 or, I think 2012, maybe 2014, sorry. This is one of those years in the past. And so I apologize for the image in one sense. That is, when you work with something like National Geographic, what you have to do is they have to find ways to sex it up a little bit. And so we never found this context like this because the roofs had all collapsed and the chambers were full of dirt and it was a mess. And unfortunately that meant the archeological context was a bit of a mess as well. So it wasn't the kind of context that we would normally like to have. So we did excavate as carefully as we could under the constraints and then they asked us, well, what do you think it really looked like? And so we tried to give them an idea about what it really looked like. And this is what you see. You see an individual in a coffin. I'll show some of these in a moment. You see some artifacts on the floor. You see some animal heads, sheep and goat and yak and horse. Those were all found in that context as well. And you see something off to the right-hand side that's a gold and silver mask that I'll have some conversation about in a moment. The particular orientation of these things is unclear to us but I think that's not terribly bad given the jumbled nature, excuse me, of the context. You'll notice that one individual lying on the floor. That isn't exactly made up by National Geographic but it's close. There were two individuals in this context. We said, no, it's not a hole when we only could find parts of this person but they made it into a whole person. So don't worry about this person for right now. I wanna worry about the person inside the chamber and inside the coffin because that's the person of interest in this context. So here's what the coffin looks like right now. And so I just ask you to gaze on this for a moment and remember some of the motifs that you see because you'll see them again in different formats and different contexts that will provide us with some clue as to what's going on in terms of the relationships of the people who live in this region and the exterior relations they may have had in the distant past. The wood is a local wood. Some of it's been imported from down below. It's painted only on that one side. There's no other painting or other kind of modification other than making a nice stone, sorry, a wooden coffin in this context. As I promised, here's the mask that we found inside that coffin. So picture the coffin sitting as you saw on the back of the chamber and inside this kind of jumble rock because a stone that almost had fallen right into the coffin and did some damage to the individual that was inside but not enough to actually make a difference. This is what we find. It's a relatively large mask. You can see that it's been painted. It's done in Rippuset technique. The nose is kind of projecting. The eyes are fairly well painted on one side. It's made out of gold and silver. So you see a gold face on this and then you see a silver backing. You don't see that very well but if you look to the left hand side of the image you'll see some silvery color. That's where the gold has washed away in one sense. We did some work over at UCL on this particular mask and it turns out that the amount of gold that one would need to make a mask the size and you can see the scale down below. That's 10 centimeters. You need a piece of gold about the size of a large pea. So gold is quite maleable obviously and so what they did with this was bend it, shape it, bend it, bend it, push it and make it very, very thin and the silver behind it as well is very thin. So it's a fairly remarkable piece of art as well as for me and the archaeologists trying to understand what this is all about. So this is the mask from inside that context. Now here's where things get a little more curious about this mask and I'm gonna have to ask you to at least bear with me on this conversation because I didn't believe it at first. So important for you to understand I was skeptical and when I say skeptical I'm looking at the mask going yes okay and I have a graduate student who is training in France right now and you know she's been working on the project for a number of years and she said look what I've discovered, okay, show me what you've discovered. She's been looking at these photos a lot more carefully apparently than I have but if you look really carefully and I do mean carefully I've convinced myself that it actually is there. Maybe this is a confirmation bias but I do believe there's something there that bears some consideration. Can you see what I'm looking for right there? You can't, that's okay. You don't have to, the first time I looked at it I didn't see it. You're shaking your head yes though. That's swastika. Oh, brilliant, you actually see it. Good, it's not like I made this up is it? It's a swastika on the face of this individual. Now I'll show you where I think it is. I mean it might be a little more difficult to see. You can see this part of it fairly clearly now. Another image I have will actually show this arm here and then the other on this side. So it actually comes through fairly clearly once you see it and I did ask my student and I before I came here I said look Mary do you really believe there's a swastika here? Convince me one more time. So she didn't, these are not faked photos. I just simply glue it up so you can see this image. So there's a swastika on the face of this individual. That's kind of interesting to know. This was, this is certainly unheard of in Nepal and you'll see in a moment that it's also unheard of in other places where there's a similar mortuary tradition in this region. Well if that one's a little more difficult to see but thank you for being so observant and brilliantly able to capture the essence of this argument, I bet you can find this one more clearly. Everybody sees this one, you're just not working with me today. Let me blow this one up again to let you see it. There it is right there. This is the same kind of mask, gold, silver, much thinner though, very, very thin work. It's actually unfortunately has completely, it's almost completely disintegrated. We've not been able to bring these out of the location in which they were found. The Nepali government owns this only in name. That is they don't, the villagers own this. They will not let it out of their sight but now all it is is a bag of dust unfortunately. Almost a bag of dust. So we have another mask then. We'll go back just to look at it and it's a little war because the way it was found in context was it was folded in on itself like a little origami. So unfolding it then revealed this but it also fell apart during that process of seeing what it actually was. So it's the same idea though, gold and silver and painted you can see the beard and mouth and you can see at least, you can see both of the eyes they just been moved around a bit. All right, so we've got two golden masks with swastikas on them which are curious in themselves. Swastikas don't usually appear in this part of Nepal until much later in time but then we also encountered something like this which is more clearly something that is related to Buddhism. You'll notice I'm saying I'm being cautious about that attribution because I will make an interpretation of this at some point but I'm not ready to do so yet. This is a very large satsa or a clay plaque and the way in which it is constructed is about 15 centimeters from top to bottom so they're scaled in this one but it's basically a big lump of clay that's been impressed with a mold and the mold presses that down and then when it's finished it's not fired in any sense. It was placed inside a tune context. You'll notice then that there is painting on it so it was one time painted at least with red and other colors were not so certain about. As you can see it's not in terribly great shape and I'll show some other images as well that unfortunately it's even in worse shape today but it's fairly clear as to at least you can see imagery. Figure seated on a throne. You can see individuals standing beside. You can see other things around it that I'll make an attempt to interpret in a moment. So the first golden mask was found in tune five with the individual inside the coffin. The golden mask I showed, the second one was found in tune one or one four as I call it within a totally different context with no coffin associated with it but it was inside that context. This tzatzah is found in that context as well. So there's that one and that and then there's something else as well. When I first saw this I headed upside down, sorry. What this is is a clay model of a chorten or a stupa and the way in which these are made is is that what you're seeing down below is the clay that creates the, you know, it put into a mold, you jam it into a mold and then what you do eventually is to cut off that bottom part. The bottom part should have been cut off somewhat higher but in this particular case it wasn't. And so again, this is a very clearly, it's got, well it's a stupa slash chorten. I'm calling it Buddhist right now only because that's what I think it's likely to be. Again, painted inside tomb one as well. And then the last thing is a very curious object that I won't talk much more about because I had a very difficult time trying to find analogs of this in any published literature that I have access to. It's a clay figure and if you look really carefully you see some potentially distinguishing features of it. Down at the bottom you can see something that looks like an ear, notice. It's got some red pigment inside of you. How is your observational skill at this point? You see the ear, good, okay. So she sees that, so it must mean it's there actually. So in any case, there is an ear. And if you look at the top, we've talked to a lot of people about this and many people, not everyone, but many people believe that what we're looking at is the, it's a sculptured head of the Buddha with likely that's its Ushinisha on top of his head. Now, do I know that for sure? I don't know. You're skeptical, that's okay. Painted red again, broken in this fashion and it's about this large around. So it's relatively large. The pieces, they're gone so we don't know, we have nothing else. So we've got those objects then. Some gold masks, very large tsa-tsa, shortened image and then we've got this. So as I say, you can find all sorts of imagery of the Buddha and his Ushinisha but nothing quite like this that I've seen in clay, unfired clay again as it stands. All right, well, let's put this stuff in time because as an archaeologist, this is one of the things I have to do is to understand when these things are so that I can make sense of making comparisons and one to the other. So here's radiocarbon dates from the Samsung Contact. So what you're looking at then those are the bars of the probabilities of those dates and the red bars are more probable times than other times. The problem is is that if you know anything about radiocarbon dating, you know that we have to calibrate the radiocarbon years against calendar years. And what happens is that calibration curve in some places is really ugly. Sometimes it's nice and straight and you get one date across and everyone's happy. But what happens in this case is the calibration curve gets all chunky. And so what that means is that there are some probabilities then that are in there that are slightly higher or slightly lower than what we might like. But we live with that. And if you take a look then at the way in which these dates are distributed, you can see fairly clearly that the majority of them fall. There's a number that falls sometime between roughly 400 and roughly 550. And then there's another batch that goes from about 550 to somewhat beyond in 700 or so. And we've got an outlier way up there. The two contexts though that I'm talking about that is the golden mask from Tomb 5 and the artifacts that I'm attributing to some kind of Buddhist thinking. Here's the Tomb 5 date. And you'll see how relatively early that is. And then you'll see the dates of the other objects. So they're early, all things being equal. And you can take those bars for what they're worth. But if you wanna have an average date that come in sometime around, let's just say 550 AD or so. So for here, that's early in terms of any presence of anything that you would remotely want to talk about. That is Buddhism. Simply shouldn't be here at this time. Shouldn't be here means maybe they haven't been discovered yet. But in this case, this is the best date that we have right now to talk about anything that looks like Buddhism in the Himalayan arc of this region. Well, all right, let's look at some other lines of evidence then to get a sense of what other people think is the presence or the appearance of Buddhism in the region. And we go now to a place called Lugekar. Did you get to go to Lugekar? Okay, so a nice slide of Lugekar. And if you know about what Lugekar is all about, it's the tourism authority has put up a very nice sign on it. And the date on it, don't worry about the details. I'll tell you the details. They basically say sometime in the eighth century is when Lugekar is supposed to have been founded. All right, so that's what they say as to when this is the case. Am I got that right? Yeah, eighth century. And the context, of course, if you know something about the way in which Buddhism is supposedly gone into Nepal from the Tibetan plateau, it all has to do with the founding of Samye. And the construction of the Samye monastery and temple complex, the story goes that they were having a great deal of time building Samye. Gets built, demon knocks it down. This is not convenient. So what happens then is that someone asks this individual, Padma Savava, or Guru Rinpoche to go take care of the demon that lives in that part of the world. The demon, Guru Rinpoche goes, slays the demon. The demon's bodily parts are spread all over that part of the valley. And the monastery is then constructed at that point. If you've seen those images of the supine demon as well, this is one of the things pinning her down is this monastery that's called Loghekar. So the dates are supposed to be eighth century. Well, if that's the case, and we take a look then at our radiocarbon dates, and let's see, we could even push that a little bit further to the left if we wanted to, kind of thinking, well, maybe it's this or maybe it's that. It supposedly was founded after Samye. Samye is something like 775 AD, if that's the case. That red line says that's when Loghekar should have been founded. And so very clearly then, everything that we have at Samsung with the exception of that one outlying radiocarbon date is much earlier than this. So whatever we have is not related to the founding of Loghekar, at least as far as we can tell right now. Fine. Do we have any other evidence that we can come up with to be able to tie these objects into a Buddhist presence that is still somewhat unknown, and I can give you a bit of a hint on that evidence right now. So the circle indicates the radiocarbon dates that we talked about from Samsung. And so the other radiocarbon dates that you see there, now of course we know there's Buddhism in the valley much after this. Of course there is. All the painting, all the monasteries, all that stuff is there. But I want to prove to you that there's a Buddhist presence in the valley, the Kalagandaki Valley, Upper Mustang, after the founding of Loghekar. But I want to know whether or not there's any other, any other indicators of an earlier presence of Buddhism that we have identified in the region. And the answer is not yet, and maybe not ever. And so those two lines you see to those two radiocarbon dates, this is work that's being done by my graduate student, Mary Ann Poo. And she's been doing a pedestrian survey of Upper Mustang and walking basically all the way from the border down to Johnson essentially. And essentially what she's been trying to do is to locate any number of archaeological sites by that process. And a number of the sites then that she's been able to obtain radiocarbon samples from are indicated on this image. So there's many more sites that she's found. We know a lot of them. But these are the only ones that have been dated. And as you can see, the dates are late, aren't they? You know, 1,000 AD, 950 AD, give or take. These are both shortens. They're constructed someplace in Upper Mustang. So we know there's a presence there that is early. It's certainly after Loghekar, but it's nothing as early at this point as we have at Samzong. So whatever, if we agree that what we have at Samzong is Buddhist, then we have to explain where it's coming from under its own term. It is not coming from a plateau source. Insofar as I can tell, at least we can talk more about that in a moment. So let's now turn back to our region for a second, back to Samzong and talk about its geographic location. This is where the archaeologist comes back in again. What you're looking at here are glass beads. And glass beads are a remarkably good indicator of the movement of trade because you can track them using different kinds of technologies. And what you're looking at in the upper left-hand side are glass beads from what's now modern Pakistan. You know, it would be called the Sindh, at least that's what our analyst called it. If you take a look at the register of green beads in the middle, you find those are coming out of Sasanian contact. In other words, fairly far west than what would be, I think, modern Iran today. So that was a bit of a surprise for us. And then the remainder of the beads you'll notice that the black numbers are called Indian Southeast Asian ones. Well, some of them are from, excuse me, relatively far north in India. And some of them are actually found from either very southern India or also Sri Lanka or even possibly Thailand. So what's being said here is that this place is hardly isolated. So Samzong looks like it's nowhere, but yet they're getting goods from somewhere and these somewheres are very far from. So it's not as if you can't get there from here, okay? Things are moving. This is not the only thing that's moving in this region. You'll see this image, again, this object. This is a copper ladle. And we've been doing, again, the archaeo metallurgy on this and we find that we don't know if this was exactly made in India but the chemical signature of this object say this is of northern Indian origin. That is the shaping as well as the composition are likely having a northern Indian source. Where, can't say exactly where, but we know that it's not local. They're not making these things in Samzong. They're making them someplace else. If you want other things, and you'll see another reason to talk about this mirror in a bit, this is a bronze mirror that is very clearly of Tibetan or Central Asian origin. It was found in Samzong 5 with the individual in the stone coffin. The motif on it is very clearly from, you know, my colleague John Belazer would call this Central Asian Tibetan. I think he's right. He has examples of this that I've seen from private collections. So it feels pretty good that this is something coming from plateau now back down into this region. It is not a chemical composition that you see constructed anywhere in India at this time. So it's someplace else. And if you're not happy with that, then I'll give you something else to be slightly happy about then. Chinese silk. So this is a very crude Chinese silk. It's not as fancy as some of the Chinese silks you'll see in other contexts. But it's basically been identified by our folks working on this as a real crude, but Chinese silk that's been covered with cinnabar. So we don't know where the cinnabar is actually from, but we do know the silk is not local. It's not from India. It's not from any place else that we know of. It's coming from someplace that way. And to give you a sense of what that way means, let me show you this image right here. This is supposed to be, Tim Williams and his colleagues at UCL have been developing over the years a way to think about the silk roads as a kind of a way to conceive of them in a larger sense for entry into the... Sorry, what is that thing I'm thinking about? You know, the register of all those important places, archeological on the planet. I'm looking at you because you're an archeologist. You should be able to tell me this. You know, basically they're looking at nominations for historic properties for the United Nations. Thank you. I don't know why I couldn't think of that. You're really on today. That's good. So what you're looking at then, if you look at carefully at this image, you see the Tibetan Plateau of course to the north and then what you find the Himalayas in between that and the Indian subcontinent. The orange line coming down is supposed to be one of the primary routes from the northwest onto the plateau down this direction. You'll notice then that there's a feeder line that comes off from the very upper left-hand side down into India itself. And you'll see three different routes that have been proposed to go across the Himalayas that are supposedly documented by historical or other literature. I know of one for sure, and that's the one that goes through Mustap. That's the one in the middle right there that starts, you can see, down on Lumbini and then going up to Lomantang and then off into the Himalayas at that point. So I'm feeling fairly confident that that really is a spur of that comes either off to or onto the Silk Road from some direction. But here's my point, that is that objects from the Indian subcontinent are going up into this region and there's things coming down into Samzong from somewhere else. Probably from maybe on the plateau, possibly from the northwest Himalayas. So this is the connection I'm trying to offer you now as a way to begin to think about the providence of the objects that I've showed you, what the likely source of them may well happen to be. So let's go back to our images now and try to work through what their meanings might be and connect them to a larger place. So the first thing I can do for you is to give you a sense of thinking about them as a class of objects. We're talking about Samzong now. And those have been studied fairly exhaustively in the Tibetan Plateau. And I know they've been studied in the Indian subcontinent but you don't see much of this work being done in Nepal, certainly. You see some of it in Afghanistan and sort of the northwestern part of the Buddhist world. Nepal still is a big hole in the map where we really don't have much of a clear sense of data on this. So once I go through as a class and what we'll do is I'll try to give you a sense of what these things might look like from a stylistic standpoint. So let's talk about as a class. I have two sources that help me understand this a bit. You'll see them both down at the bottom. And they suggest that objects of some kind or another could be beginning as late as the 7th century AD or possibly as early as the 2nd century AD. So they have a long span of time. Notice that the Tibetan examples, that is the only ones we know about on the plateau so far and this has been fairly exhaustively studied, they really only begin to be found or to be discussed in literature between the 8th and 9th centuries AD. So they're relatively late as objects on the plateau but they're relatively early then if you will when you look at them from an Indian perspective. How early? Well, that's something that's still open to me because finding publications of these relatively humble artifacts is really difficult to find. Everyone wants to talk about the mural painting and everyone wants to talk about the beautiful sculptures and no one wants to talk about the little messy, you know, satsang, unless they've got writing on them that makes everybody excited at that point. Well, I don't have writing online at this stage. But if we look at the timeframe just for a moment then if you believe the later timeframe to the 7th century you'll see that some of the possibilities overlap just a bit with the very tail of the radiocarbon dates from Samsung. Notice the ones down at the bottom, those are the places where the satsang were found in context one, chamber one. If you believe that then they could be dating to that period but maybe not. It's hard to tell because those are really outside the likely probability estimate of where those dates are and that's possible. So they could be as late as that. But that still doesn't help us much then with the swastikas on the faces of our friends unless we don't believe that those are actually relating to Buddhism. So we'll see. Let's take a look at this stylistically now for a moment. So there's the image and I now thank David Pritzker for helping me with this because he was very, I talked about this the next few years ago in a very much less studied way and he said, I'll find some, I'll get something for you, I'll help you out on this. And he was very kind about helping me find imagery because this is stuff that he obviously is working on as well. So look very carefully then at the image then and what I want to show you is a piece of this particular satsang that's important. I've blown that bottom of the throne up and I'm asking now, you've got the eye. What am I trying to show you in this image right now? And you're still working on it. I know, but it's okay. That's okay. Are you seeing something? Yeah, it's a piece of cloth hanging down on the throne. That's, could be hard to say what that is but what are those two little things beside it? There's where I'm trying to get your attention. There are the feet of the stool where they're possibly lying. Did I hear you use the word lion? Yes. Well, that's a question for you. Yeah, I'm projecting too. But that's what we do when we look at artifacts like this. We project to go, maybe, maybe not. So I'm asking you to look, especially the one on the left because that one is preserved. One on the right has been damaged by whatever had happened to it in the cave. And what I'm suggesting and what David suggested to me as well is if you take a look at an image like this, a 17th century bronze from SWAT, and I'm not, I mean, it's obviously far more elaborate, far more complex, but what is the image, what is the individual sitting on, a throne and what's beside the throne supporting our two lions? Notice the date relatively early, 17th century Northwestern Himalayan region. All right? That's one. There are others as well. I'll just show you a few. Here's one from Gilgit that is pretty much the same general age, a bit earlier though in this particular case, 16th century Gilgit. So I'm making a fairly direct statement that suggests that the lions that you see on the tzatzah of supporting my little guy are in fact likely to be lions derived from an artistic tradition that comes out of the Northwestern Himalayas. We'll see. The one thing that we do not have, hold on, one thing we do not have, we have no inscriptions on any of these, so I can't answer anything more about that. Yes, sir. But the parallel is very good because you see that on the bronze there's the circles and that's replicated in the tzatzah of the conches. Yeah, I feel good at this. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that level of support because, you know, as I said, I kind of stick myself out a little bit on these things. So in any case, I feel fairly comfortable. You're very friendly. Oh, no, that's all right. In any case, this is suggesting a Northwestern Himalayan connection is what I would argue in this instance with this particular object. Here it gets a little trickier because I can't really answer this. This is that shortened that we have or that stupa. You know, finding examples from the Indian literature is very difficult. You can find ones. You know, I was looking online and Indians have stuff published in a site in Mongolia, Caracota. It's like, great, that's not much help for me, especially when they're all dating to the 12th century or so. So I don't have a direct timeframe that I can give you for these short moves in other analogs. This one is from Afghanistan. This is one of the closest analogs I could find. It's said to be early, notice my fingers, but they don't, of course, say how early the site was in terms of that publication. So I have analogs that suggest there in Northwestern Himalayan venues relatively early in time, but how much earlier I really can't say. But just be a big difference between the two. The one represents one stupa only, which yes, and the other one represents the stupa with eight stupas around. That's the one you have. That is still being today. Okay. This one's not, the one we've got in the context, though, is it? Yes, at least that one is not me. Okay, good. Thank you for correcting me on that. I mean, I'll just have to look harder for better analogs from India, but this is what we found so far. So one connection I am making, though, is there's something going on to the northwest from where we are in Samsung. There's commerce going up down north-south. Northwest has a different kind of connection. Let's talk about these masks a little bit now. There's a third mask I haven't shown you. It just came out of the same context, number one, tomb number one, chamber number one. It was also folded up as well. It was not as fancy. Same construction, same technology. A little bit of paint on it, but nothing very significant. So the question then we're going to have to ask ourselves is what about these masks and what are they telling us about the region because there are other gold masks from other contexts in western Tibet. Now these are not the scale. The images were, you know, they have a scale for all of these. The first two on the left are from an archaeological site in western Tibet called Chufag, and the second one is from Gurgyam, which is very much near the putative silver castle of, you know, the tutu described in his travels in that region. Qiong Womulka is the name of the place. The Chufag sample is about 15 centimeters, so it's relatively large. And the other two are quite small. They're only tiny little masks. So we've got those three masks. There's actually another mask that was found in northwestern India that I won't talk about now, but in the same Himalayan context as well. Very similar to these. You'll notice that there, the one on the left is quite elaborate. It's got a turban and with different animal motifs on it. Amy Heller has talked a good deal about what she thinks the symbology of the turban is and the animals on it. The other two have been less described for one reason or another. They noticed their dates. The dates are between the first and second centuries of this AD give or take. Maybe a little bit later is the possibility. So clearly there's something going on in the western Himalayas that has these masks as part of the context. They're not the only ones that we see in this region. The one on the left is from an archaeological site in Xinjiang called Bulma. You'll see the date relatively contemporary with the other two. And then we have this great mask from a cemetery context in Kyrgyzstan that's dated 300 to 400 AD or CE. You'll notice one thing on the Kyrgyzstan mask that you've seen before. You've seen that motif of the tree. The eye interpret as a tree. I think others do as well. Also on the coffin as well. So there's another stylistic connection. I don't know where it's coming from except from there's an idea that that might be the case. So clearly there's golden masks around then that at least go to Mustan and then take themselves all the way back then to as far west as Kyrgyzstan. Some people have tried to stretch away far back to the Greeks and let's just not go there. I can't get into diffusionism or the kind of craziness but I can only go so far. These work out pretty well for me just in terms of dates. But that's not all that is interesting about these western Tibetan tombs. Both of them have a context that are full of wooden box coffins as well. So the tombstone ones you see there you'll notice and you don't see the other side but they are not painted as is the Mustan one. They are a little bit worse for the wear but they're not painted either. Now one thing that may change some of these interpretations I'm about to show you is that Chinese have really been spending a lot of quality time working in western Tibet now excavating these sites. So I would expect a fairly significant publication coming out in another year or so that really describes these things in great detail. Among some of the things they found they found some cannabis out here. They found some tea here. This is not a trivial location in terms of trade going back and forth in this region. But I show you these because the coffins are there and they have an obvious similarity to the ones in Mustan. And just to go back to that again but I'm going to show you that motif now. And so there's the Samzong motif and notice this other coffin that we have from a Xionggu context in Xinjiang later but similar. So this X motif I've seen it a lot now I won't speculate more on it because you find it... I will speculate a little. You find it on pottery from this time frame you find it in all sorts of different contexts which are quite interesting on the Tibetan Plateau as well as across the Central Asian region down into Mustan. So I'd like to now kind of turn to an interpretation of why the masks are important in this context as part of the story. This is where I get in trouble with my colleagues, the tibetologists, because they tell me that oh really you can't say those things but I'm going to try to say them anyway. So fortunately I can use the authority of somebody really important in Tibetan law school studies as somebody who can back this up. This is work that he's done using these sources. These are textual sources that you can see here from the huang and then two bone texts. Now keep in mind that these are bone texts written in later times so they're not obviously even remotely contemporary but they're describing times in the earlier that is described in these documents. And here's the way that Samton describes these and this paper is published now we just never have received the volume unfortunately one of our Shang Chun conferences. You'll notice the different categories of material and so there's two on here that I think would be that connect two things I've shown you so far and those would be the first one which is the yellow gold face image and Samton believe the Zhao is connected to the golden mask and then the other one at the bottom number five is the mirror which is that disc I showed you. With the materials I can't find a material correlate for them in the tomb itself but we've got two of the five and so I show you this as a way to suggest that at least what we can begin to think about now is placing those masks into what I would call a bone context and those of you who know anything about Tibet know that that bone is just this crazy thing that's either very early it goes way back in distant prehistory this religion of Tibet I don't know I mean we talk about it a lot but we don't know much about it in terms of the early thing that we might call bone so I'm just offering this as a possibility for the way in which we might interpret these masks. Just to be fair I am going to show you John Belazer's interpretation which is quite different he doesn't believe that the golden masks really have much to do with these with my ideas but I'm not sure really hardly anything in his interpretation of these documents supports anything that I say in terms of the mirror or the masks but that's alright we all have our opinions on the way these things work clearly I'm going to believe what Samson Karmé says in this context because it supports what I think is going on in this context in any case so here's the key though it appears that again there's a bone connection I'd like you to think about so now we're going to go to Lubra in Mustan, this is in Lower Mustan right now, it's a place that Charles Ramble studied extensively I'm going to talk about a little bit about this thing called the dos ceremony which is a ceremony that's essentially done at the end of the year it's sort of a clean up and you know kind of get rid of all the bad energy and start a new start of fresh and it's a fairly complex and long ceremony that's involved to do this process in this village I should point out that Lubra is probably the only remaining bone village in all of Mustan right now that is the folks who live here are true bone practitioners and so there may well be others in the valley but this is a concentration of them that have maintained their religious practice for some time so in case you didn't know about it you need to understand how to make cha it's something that is relevant I would ask you to start with the rice in this instance and then go through those different stages you add some, that thab is yeast of some kind and that's basically the starter that makes this ferment and then you store it and then you drink it as cha so why do I care about this in this context it's a complicated argument but I'm circling back to the point so at the end of this ceremony that Charles has described in great detail in the document that you see down below is the citation is that there's a, the final stages of this is something called the transfer of stewardship and what takes place under this transfer of stewardship is that two individuals that had been the nominal leaders of the village are now leaving that post and two others are taking their place and so there's a special rice beer that is made at that point and it's a very special one it's a little more complicated than the one recipe that I showed you just a moment ago but its point is it's a very clear, very not potent in any significant way in terms of alcohol but a very clean white rice beverage so it's made clearly out of rice and it has some material culture that goes with it that is specified in the ritual as it's prepared today and that ritual is there are two vessels one that has the same one in it and the other that has a different chan which is used as part of this ceremony it has a ladle that you take, scoop out one of the contents and then pour it into a different container and then the third thing is that that container where the same chan sits is on an iron tripod so these are things that are essential to the ceremony and that the iron tripod is wrapped in wool or white copper so this is how Charles sees this process unfolding you've seen these all before you might not have seen them in detail but now you're going to see them again in the National Geographic standpoint and if you look very carefully what do you see in the upper right hand corner you see the big pot you see the ladle you see the smaller pot and you see the iron tripod this proves that they actually existed because I don't want you to think that I made this up just because National Geographic told me to do that here they all are but there's another part of this this is when archaeology gets even more fun the ladle you see that you see the large vessel that's down in the bottom left hand side I believe that is the one that had the other chan in it the smaller copper vessel I believe was sitting on the iron tripod and that bamboo cup is a cup that has been used and it's not what they use today as some other kind of device that Charles describes as a flask we won't go there particularly but I show you these images because what we did in archaeology in this case was we looked at two things could we find any direct evidence of what these things may have contained or if we can't find direct evidence can we make some inferences about it well we got lucky on these things so that bamboo cup in the upper left hand side it did not have rice grains in it but it had rice protein in it so we were doing proteomics basically in other words you're looking for proteins that signal a particular kind of substance well it's got rice proteomics in that unfortunately none of the other metal vessels contained any evidence directly of this but the one thing that did contain evidence of this ritual process is that iron tripod which we find in the context it had wool it had wool proteins as well as wool wrapped all around it and we actually found if I go back one more the ladle had wool proteins all around it as well so clearly there's something interesting going on here we've got rice we've got rice proteins we've got wool we've got other objects then that signal this ceremony that we have taking place so this is interesting I mean if you believe there's a certain level of cultural continuity here which I think is plausible in Mustang what you're looking at is something that looks like an analog to the transference of stewardship in this context there is a reason I bring this up I keep saying that and I'm getting there okay if you didn't and we have bamboo cups and rice grains in them so there's a lot going on that's suggestive of this ceremony that is reflected in the 2.5 context so let's review some contexts now just to give us a sense of alright we're heading now toward the explanations of how these objects got to where they are so I mentioned that there's a lot of north south western polity at this time in Nepal is called Lichabi and we know that there was Buddhism in the Kathmandu valley at this time in this period of time they were clearly there but they were very busily making dekharas and being good monks they did not do these more quotidian things so this is a very different kind of Buddhism and clearly does not seem to have had any significant influence moving up into the valley but it's there in response to this I don't believe that's the case north south trade certainly existed but I don't think again it was the source of those Buddhist objects that we see of any of the motifs or in the styles of the ideas or what have you it's not coming from the north there's nothing to come from yet that is we're still a little bit ahead of ourselves you know if you the Tibetan histories talk about some kind of establishing Buddhism in the court sometime around you know 650, 660 give or take our stuff is a little earlier than at samsung so it's unlikely that that is coming down again and besides that would be court religion not what I see in these funny little context in these chambers I do believe there's a very strong north western Himalayan connection that goes somewhere that way where exactly it's kind of unimportant to say exactly where but it's very clear that you know some of the stylistic motifs some of the objects themselves they clearly are coming from a western direction the local context if we go back to samsung for a moment and think about what's going on in terms of I try to refrain from calling it a religious tradition only because I don't know if this is religion I can describe it to you as a mortuary context and undoubtedly had religious or ritual components to it so you know we've got people being buried in shaft tombs we've got people being placed in wooden coffins or on platforms we have plenty of animal sacrifice these caves are full of people's animals being mostly heads but other parts as well so this is a very different context than one would find in a buddhist setting one thing I didn't talk about in this presentation but others says that the way in which the dead were disposed of in these shaft tombs is quite interesting we were able to determine that each of the individuals placed in them had been defleshed and their bodies had been I guess decarnated a word? I don't know but you get the idea their bodies have been the bones have the flesh has been stripped off their bones and the bones show signs of that process infants, men, women, boys, girls everybody was defleshed in the context this is clearly not a buddhist kind of activity although some people have tried to make claim that it was but I don't think it is so it's very different in terms of the local context as you see and so is this going well, jeez don't pin me down but there are relationships here that ritual that I described the transference of a sponsorship or stewardship probably the gold masks have something to do with it as well that's what we've talked about is it something related to it probably now let's go back to our images just for a moment and try to pull this all together I can't say much about these being dating these in any other context other than what I have in Senzon swastikas they're all over the place they're very early, they're found all over the world I can't say much more than that except that I do believe they have some kind of a Buddhist presence okay this is where it gets really tricky you can call me out on this but we have to try unfortunately this object, you see it's broken already that is we went back to Samzon to do another photo shoot and the locals had stored it and it has now fallen apart so there's an image I want you to look really carefully and see what we can see about the way in which the hands are formed in the mudra it's important that we at least make a try at this and we can always say well we can't do it and we'll have to go back home again so let me try to suggest what's going on here unfortunately you can see that the left arm is coming this way but down into the lap right but you can't see what the hand is doing but let's pretend for a moment that the hand is going like this just to start with okay take a look at the right hand we can see the arm fairly clearly and you can go all the way down to the fingers but it makes a difference which way the fingers are going if the fingers are going this way that's the earth witness mudra no can't see the fingers you can see two of the fingers can't you can see two of them kind of shaping this way if it's going this way that's the mudra that's involved in welcoming or greeting or generosity what do you think it's okay to say I don't know because I can't say either it could be either one of those two yes not clearly no I agree good it's too low it's too low good I'm happy you have another opinion about it well the other hand the left hand it's not going to gesture with the left hand it's not the way the arm is correct so the arm that hand has to be in his lap so you can forget that so the other one in terms of interpretation in terms of the other hand and his hands just said it comes down quite far I feel comfortable personally saying it's there touching the ground we had the fingers I'd be a lot happier but I think this is close enough and I appreciate the agreement it's important at least from my argument it's important it's there because it's also connected to this as well and if you know there is a cult of the stupa that's out there in the world about this time and although many people talk about the cult of the stupa is actually building stupas on the landscape because those are supposed to hold the relics of the Buddha or script that goes along with the Buddha's words being placed inside these stupa it's clear from the Indian tradition as well that they're actually creating miniature stupa as well so they're not simply just making big ones on the landscape they're making these little ones although I couldn't give you a definitive date remember I was having a hard time pinning it down it's clear that when you read the literature describing this cult of the stupa as being out there making miniatures of this kind so we've got a miniature of a earth mudra earth touching mudra we've got the cult of the stupa that's beginning to spread it spreads from its Indian heritage up into the northwest and then obviously I'm suggesting what is it doing circling back down again from the northwest into this region and now we can finally sum it up northwest works for me as a conduit from much of what I've talked about today I think that the appearance of that satsa with the earth touching as well as the appearance of the chorten is very much connected to the images of the Buddha's enlightenment which is part of the cult of the stupa as well that's what the texts are supposed to say when they put them inside the stupas themselves so I think there's a very clear connection at least in my mind between that satsa with the earth touching as well as part of the cult of the stupa that's again coming from up and back down again these symbols though they get inserted into local traditions they're not taking anything over if you take a look at the entire mortuary process at samson nothing is going on there that is becoming a more Buddhist practice with that animal sacrifice the way in which human bodies are being processed in these contexts everything tells me that this is something different and may well be very much bone-related so I call that small scale Buddhism there was an article by another fellow that used that term I'm using it in a slightly different way to say families or lineages some of them are picking this up and whatever their motivations are I can't answer but clearly it's motivation enough to place and take the time and expense to create a gold mask with a swastika and put it into a mortuary context as well as the other objects as well the very large number of people though are not using those symbols they're simply staying with what they've always been doing how that's being spread it could be it's certainly by trade we know that there are Buddhist missionaries that began from you know lived in northwest and came down the Himalayan arc around this time so it could easily be being spread by those folks some people are you might say infected by the Buddhists and missionaries and this material then is placed into those contexts and finally here's what I call my my bonus speculation there's a bonus you notice that we had some gold masks in western Tibet and none of them none of those context those tombs have no they have no Buddhist materials in them whatsoever there are no sansa there are no sorry there's no golden there are golden masks none of them are decorated beyond what you saw so why don't they have even a bit of reflection of some of these tricks well you could argue they're not picked up by anybody so therefore it's not important I have a different way to think about this because if you look where these tombs are the gyrgym cemetery is right beside the what I would call the putative capital of Changchun right I walked over it years and years ago didn't know it was there sadly I couldn't I wouldn't have been allowed to dig it anyway but the point is I was it was right there the one in Nadi which is the Chothag is again near a very important probable Changchun center what I'm really thinking is that those golden masks are certainly part of a local tradition inserted into this probably from the northwestern Himalayas but the reason why that the Buddhist motifs don't seem to be placed in them I think that Changchun is quite strong here I think what it's doing here is it may well be simply not providing opportunity or context for the placement of those sorts of objects into those tombs now that's speculation entirely bonus but yet I think it does work for me in terms of why we see them here and why we don't see them elsewhere so that's my presentation and I will end by simply saying thank you to all the people who gave us money for doing all this work as well as the colleagues I've had that helped me figure out some of these things and of course the very kind invitation from Nathan to come and talk about them in this context so again thanks very much for your time and for your attention