The Burial Mounds of Central Tibet, Part II

The burial in mound graves was widespread in ancient Eurasian cultures, with a chronology from the Bronze Age to the Early Middle Ages. One associates this with the development of chiefdoms and early empires whose political elite was buried in graves of often enormous dimensions. Most popular are the tombs of the Scythians, first noted by Herodotus (c.490-425 BC), where it is interesting that some parallels of the statements in Herodotus are also to be found in old Tibetan documents representing here only one indication of the much-observed affinities of the Highlands pre-Buddhist cultures with the larger history of the Eurasian world. The tradition of erecting burial mounds in Tibet refers to the time of the Tibetan Empire (7th-9th cent. CE.) and the preceding period of regional principalities in Central Tibet, the main area of the tumuli distribution on the plateau. One peculiarity is the source situation, where the combination of written sources and the on site information allows a fairly good description of the historical contexts of the tumulus tradition; moreover, the fact of using individual mounds still today is unique, as they serve as the seat of protective deities, for instance, so that beside the countless historically opened graves we find structures that survived intact the time. The present project is proposed to continue the tumulus research that started in 2013, where in view of the dimension of the tumuli landscape (with more than 400 registered grave fields in Central Tibet) the focus was mainly on fundamental research. In the course of the data analysis of the ethnographic, archaeological, architectural and text specific surveys, significant new issues came to the fore, whose involvement in this project also will include a completely new study area. This relates to the inclusion of archaeo-astronomical surveys (on the basis of certain indications in textual source and data from the fieldwork). For Tibet this means a first venture, which in a wider sense leads us to the anthropology of the heaven, and the heavenly paradise, where the deceased were conducted, a topic with a wide range of cultural implications that also has important links with other chapters of the project. This relates to issues of social implications in the burial tradition, or the more accurate determination of the older Tibetan ties in the contact histories of the Central Asian regions. The project will be based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for Social Anthropology and carried out in cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology (national cooperation partner). The team will be significantly enlarged by three experts and includes altogether seven researchers (incl. the project leader) plus one technical ex- pert for Information and data processing.

The historical and anthropological research project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) formed Part II of a programme that initiated the first comprehensive inquiry into the Tibetan burial-mound history. This burial practice dates back to the time of the pre-historic principalities in the Highlands (ca. 4th-6th cent. CE) and saw a significant development in terms of grave construction and funeral ritual in the time of the Tibetan Empire (7th-9th. cent.). Geographically, the research focused on Central Tibet. This predominantly agrarian region around Lhasa and the side valleys of the Brahamputra has always formed the cultural and political centre in the Tibetan Highlands and alongside a smaller burial-mound landscape in north-east Tibet also represents the distribution area of the Tibetan burial mounds. A close relationship with similar traditions in older neighbouring cultures in Central Asia and the Silk Road region is very probable, yet the enormous density of grave fields and also certain external criteria such as the characteristics of the elite graves' trapezoid shape make the Tibetan example unique. The regional sites outside the necropolis of the Tibetan imperial family are mostly mixed fields with smaller round tombs and walled, often multi-chambered structures related to the military and civil elite from the time of the empire. The larger tumuli in particular are all historically opened graves, with more or less serious damage. The fact that in the first part of the project the database regarding the number of burial mounds (identified on satellite images) had grown enormously and other criteria such as the involvement of additional specialists from the field of (non-invasive) archaeology, material and textual studies made this conti-nuation of the project necessary. The focus was to advance the documentation of the burial grounds, followed by analyses related to questions of the historical context of the regional fields, the issue of social and political implications and questions of the ritual aspects of burial, with decisive progress being made in these areas. Despite governmental restrictions in terms of visits to remote sites in the Tibet Autonomous Region and also in the use of technical means, the fieldwork also provided ample results in this second phase of the research - in the area of ethnographic data collection, surface and landscape archaeological investigations as well as the architectural reconstruction of (opened) tombs. In all, the results of this project gave insights into a previously unknown dimension of Tibet's pre-Buddhist culture, information that at the same time contain ample comparative data regarding the archaeology and history of the burial-mound tradition in the greater Eurasian cultural contexts.