 Hi everyone, so thanks very much for having me to give this talk so I'm going to be presenting a recorded talk in case we have connectivity issues and I wish I could be with you all in Dublin. I can't. So, I will be doing this digitally. The question of who are the Tibetans and the origins of Tibetans and Tibetan language families has been a topic that's been featured very prominently in the press. But in archaeological paradigms for the spread of agriculture to the Tibetan plateau farm, the foragers or are presented as passive conquered or simply just ignored. So this is really got to do with this very predominant theory and archaeological literature which is this wave of advance that farmers moved into this area as a wave of advance and foragers as a result are seen as making very little linguistic or genetic contribution to to modern peoples on the plateau and its margins. So these colonizing farmers have really dominated the genetic archaeological and as a result linguistic literature about the plateau. So for instance, she had all that you see this article here. They make the explicit statement that the source population for this movement has come composed of Han Chinese people's one that obviously has political implications. Likewise, in this discourse about the origins of the Tibetans. And the role that other languages non-Tibetic languages like your wrong languages may have played is something that's been relatively ignored. So in my talk today, what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to present be presenting you some data about what we know about the archaeology of the area that currently encompasses some of the areas where I'll get wrong speakers live today. I'll talk about the prehistory of the area and how that might inform new models for thinking about the spread of the spread of languages across this area. So, first off, the, the, according to this current wave of advanced model for expansion to the region. So farmers that belong to a culture known as my jail. Which has its origins in Northwest China and whose farmers practiced militant pig farming are seen as being responsible for genetic archaeological and linguistic linguistic heritage of the plateau. So they're seen as moving out of Northwest China at around 6000 BP on to the various margins of the plateau, including the northern plateau, but also the southeastern plateau or areas that sort of roughly correspond to undo and come. So, what do we know about the magile in galeronga speaking areas well, first of all, there are several things that that seem to be apparent. So first, this culture occupies the area between about 5500 and 4000 BP. And what's clear is that we do see a spread of a spread of cultural attributes that are very similar to those of the magile core area. We see the same presence of painted vessels we see the same types of daily use where, and we see the same types of houses, sometimes even with with what appear to be human sacrifices in their bases. So there are two key sites that are worth discussing so one is in Kanshan and Mao Shen, which was located currently in a cultural area at 1750 meters above sea level and then there's the site of Hashi and Aba County on the Chabal River. So I'm going to be discussing some data from, from these two sites, and what they show about migration to the area. So at the intention, what we see data from the intention sites are shows that people lived at the site and relatively permanent waterland or houses that are very similar to those from the magile core area northern China. And another similarity that they share with these houses is the presence of the sacrifices that I said in the foundations. So the mechanical and zoo archeological evidence also shows that they relied heavily on domesticated pig at the intention, alongside both foxtail and broom corn millets. As I mentioned before the pottery assemblages both in terms of their high fired prestige and pottery, where and also their course or daily where also really dead ringers for pottery assemblages from the magile core area suggesting that farmers may indeed have moved more directly into this area, bringing more people on suite of domesticates building style and pottery repertoire with them. So I'm not going to get into too many details about the Hashi site, because I don't have too much time but one thing I did want to, to tell you about is that while it might have very similar pottery to young country and based on very limited excavations there. I don't really understand too much about housing structure at Hashi yet, but there's one key difference. So, again, we do see that the diet is overwhelmingly reliant on domestic pig. However, Hashi and other high elevation sites on the Tibetan plateau like on the northeastern plateau or show and on the central Tibetan plateau, we actually don't see any domestic animals aside from the dog. So I guess that there were varying uptakes of far farming throughout this region and not everybody adopted farming products in the same way, potentially also revealing some type of difference amongst in how people themselves identified themselves as members of an ethnic group, or not as members as one. So in terms of the cultural historical sequence, we see a real shift in the Bronze Age in this area with the arrival of the Shuguan Zang culture at around 3500 BP. So during this period of time, we no longer see people living in permanent settlements or at least we have found very, very few of them, almost none of them have been found in the region. We see the appearance of these characteristic stone cyst burials. They're often primary inhumations in these but they're also secondary burials which are found which indicate that people died in a location potentially far away. And then were reburied or their bones were replaced in this type of burial. In terms of material culture, what I haven't pictured here is there's a lot of pottery that is placed in these burials but there's also a wide range of different bronze and other items that show clear connections, both with the low lying areas in China. So you find these, you know, Bashu style daggers, but also with other areas of the step, as far away as the Ordos and Inner Mongolia in terms of decoration. So we carried out a survey. So what I'm going to be mostly presenting here today is a survey that we carried out of the Jiamudzu and the Chabal River valleys in Maracang. So this is one of the of the area we surveyed. And you can read this publication in the journal of field archaeology that Ankhain and I published together. So the areas in red represent our survey area you can tell we did not do a systematic survey of the whole area this is because we were extremely limited in terms of time. And we were limited by a couple of other factors, namely one of the slopes. So for those of you who know this area well you know that there are a couple of areas of wide river valleys and then you have extremely steep hills. So the areas with a slope of over 27 degrees were areas that are frankly unsurveyable, even if there were some archaeological remains on these they would be, they would pottery and other stuff would through erosion fall down to the to the valley bottoms. So we'd be interested in trying to survey the areas on green. However, our colleagues from the Citron Provincial Institute of archaeology we're not willing to do a thorough survey of the higher altitude areas for political reasons. So we really focused on these lower lying river valleys with one exception of an extension up here. What did we find? Well, so first of all, we found a lot of sites from what we call phase one, which are the Neolithic, Marjail type of ceramics. And then we found a very small number of phase two or Bronze Age ceramics and we found these exclusively onion graves and then we found here again a very large amount of phase three ceramics that I'll talk about the dating of but that day to the historic period. So group one ceramics, this is the distribution of them across our different site areas we didn't find any in the, in the last area area that we found quite a few centered around the lower altitude valley bottoms. And most of these associated with most of these surface ceramics scatter we could see that these were present in deeply stratified sites where you can see clear straighter so here on what we see is the floor of a burnt earth house. And these were predominantly basically distributed on the lower altitude terraces, a buttressing, the Chabal, and Jambudzu rivers. As an example of something else we found on a number of these sites are actually we, you know, kind of had to hold our breath when we discovered the number of these sites were really at huge risk for discussion so this is the Baisha monastery in the area and they were building this tower, as well as just built this new Buddha at the time that we surveyed and unfortunately in the process of doing so. They actually dug through what is potentially one of the most important my jail archaeological sites in the region and this heap of debris that they pulled out to build this building was really you know chock a block full with material culture. So from here so this is a site that was heavily destroyed during this construction. The second part of the, the, the bronze age component or our group to ceramics were only distributed in fact we only found them in in one or two locations and we only found them exclusively within these shoe ones or within these stones as tombs and these were basically based on what are pretty opportunistic finds so in this case, we were at Parabatsun, and a road was being constructed in an area of higher altitude. And this revealed the presence of these stone sciss graves that were deeply cut into the list with the typical ceramics and other material culture, but we did not find any of these ceramics in the river valley bottoms, or in the only in graves. So, again, for phase three ceramics we now moving to this phase. And I'll get into the dating of this in a little bit. We see a similar distribution to what we saw in the Marjail period again. And here, we basically see these phase three ceramics are distributed throughout the valley bottoms, but also in some areas of higher altitude like this little extension that we did here. And when we weren't carrying out excavations on the survey this was just a pedestrian survey. We opportunistically saw a couple of terrace cuts that actually had this period remain and we didn't see any in the very lower altitude on the river valleys where the Marjail sites are. But at this one village what we did see was people that dug a trash pit and we saw some cultural layers there and we radio carbon dated them. And this is basically what it showed so the what I'm sharing here is this is the different dates that we carried out on material from the region these gray ones are radio carbon dates and you can see that the Neolithic here sort of starts around 4,000 or 3,500 to about 500 ish be be BC. And then we have a couple of dates on one radio carbon date on on the stone systems that places at about 1000 BC and then some thermo luminescence dates here too so the red is thermo luminescence dates. What's really interesting is that this whole scatter that we have of both thermo luminescence dates on these later ceramics but also radio carbon dates they really sort of date between 1000 AD and present which was really interesting for the history of the region. So the location of where we got these dates from and where the ceramics are distributed suggests that people occupied these valleys quite intensively, but it also suggests potentially that their, that their sites like this one that was opportunistically found in the trash but near the village may actually be located underneath contemporary settlements which is why we don't see them. So you probably all well know. Some other interesting historic period features on the landscape, which are these towers and radio carbon dates by Da Hagon that were that were carried out in various regions suggest that the ones in this area date to about the 10th century AD but some of the various ones in central Tibet date to about 250 AD, and there are also historic texts from the Eastern Han dynasty, annals that these were built by the Rong Man tribe, speaking about the wind trend area I believe. The territory that these that these towers are found in this extends basically from Nyong'o and Kampo in the Tibet autonomous region over to what are what at least Da Hagon places in Minya traditional lands you have the ones in Galerongic speaking areas and then the ones in Malshian in, in, in Malshian. So what do some of the dates on these towers show. Well, so Da Hagon still has not made the dates for the Sichuan towers available, however, she has made the dates from Nyong'o and Gong, Gongbu Jiangda County in the Tibet autonomous region available. So what this appears to show is that these dates are somewhere between, you know, about 250 AD, and then they their life ends or their usage seems to end around the 15th century AD, or at least construction holds on around that time. They never have to really be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt because of the old wood problem so trees grow. Every time every year a tree grows puts down a ring, and trees can grow over a very long period of time particularly those in high altitude and high latitude locations like the Tibetan factor. So what I'm showing here, this is about a sequence of about 100 years difference between the core of this tree and between the middle of this tree that I'm showing here so if you got a sample from the middle, versus from the edge or from underneath the right underneath the bark, you could have up to sometimes up to 1000 years of error within this. It's possible that some of these that some of these were impacted that some of these dates are impacted by this old wood problem in fact it's highly likely. However, it, what is clear from the series of dates that I'm showing here is that at least construction of these appears to have sort of halted around the 15th century AD, and probably likely extends to at least 500, or 1000 AD in this area. So my talk is sort of left us with a lot more questions than than real answers at this point but I hope that this identifies some avenues for future research that both linguists and historians and archaeologists can collaborate on in this area so one key question for us as archaeologists is why is there a lack of stratified sites in the Bronze Age. Is there a more and more about pastoralist occupation during the Bronze Age, or our sites, maybe like the historic sites potentially buried too deeply under contemporary occupations. When do these towers really date to. And then finally again where are the historic periods sites located so we found ceramics scatter across large areas from these phase three ceramics, but only in one instance that we actually in that opportunistic trash pit that people had made, did we actually find evidence of an archaeological of a buried archaeological site or strata. And the reason by the way that ceramics are probably scattered throughout the fields that's just people will use their trash as fertilizer and then you get pottery mixed into the trash and that's how pottery gets distributed across a landscape but that doesn't mean that that was actually the area that people lived in. At least that wasn't the precise location that they lived in but they lived in a village in the vicinity but identifying the village really requires more archaeological work. So, the issue of these towers, but also, you know, thinking back to the earlier prehistory on the Bronze Age and potentially earlier, you know this raises questions about what was the original territory that go wrong xp, because occupy further what types of material cultural traits are unique to them and what are shared. And, you know, basically, like, you know, we need to try and reintegrate the important role that are played by non-tabetic language speakers in this region's history because a lot of the way that archaeologists have written about this area is, this is the eastern plateau or this is part of the Tibetan plateau, associating it with Tibetan language speakers but that of course as many of you know is really a more recent part of the history of this area and potentially does not value the role played by other language speakers and shaping the landscapes of this area throughout history. So, I'm going to be online for any questions. And I'd really like to engage in conversation with you all about the potentials that history archaeology and linguistics can bring together and our understanding of this area so I want to thank all my collaborators, particularly from the provincial Institute of Archaeology and Anka Hain who carried out these surveys, these surveys with me so thank you very much.