The ancient human remains found and stored at Samdzong, in Mustang, should be a forensic archaeologist’s delight. Instead, their neglect is testimony to a collective amnesia about the deep history of human settlement in the Himalaya.
The ancient human remains found and stored at Samdzong, in Mustang, should be a forensic archaeologist’s delight. Instead, their neglect is testimony to a collective amnesia about the deep history of human settlement in the Himalaya.Amish Raj Mulmi
Culture

The bones of Samdzong: How Mustang’s deep past is being lost just as it is being found

In Mustang, in the Nepali Himalaya, archaeological finds offer staggering insight into the pre-Buddhist history of human civilisation in the Himalaya – yet this past is being obliterated by neglect and folly
Amish Raj Mulmi

Amish Raj Mulmi is the author of All Roads Lead North: Nepal’s Turn to China (2021). His writings have appeared in Al Jazeera, Roads and Kingdoms and Mint Lounge, among other publications. He is a consulting editor at Writer’s Side Literary Agency and a contributing editor at Himal Southasian.

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WHEN OUR DRIVER puts his Bolero pick-up truck into four-wheel drive, we know he is getting serious. Ahead of us is a narrow gorge where the dirt track has decided to merge with the river. Rocks and gravel slip down the towering red, ochre and silver cliffs on either side, assisted by a howling wind.

The Bolero plods ahead on the riverbed until it cannot anymore. We have to walk the rest of the way. A rockslide reveals the earth’s guts: layers and layers of black slate that flake like perfect pastry, compressed by millions of years of geological forces and then thrust up from the Tethys Sea when the Indian tectonic plate crashed into the Eurasian one.

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Tibet
Himalaya
Nepal
history
Himal Southasian
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