Seeing Into Stone: Pre-Buddhist Petroglyphs and Zangskar's Early Inhabitants (With CD)

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Petroglyphand richest traces of human culture in Zangskar, a distinctive region of the Western Himalayas. This volume is richly illustrated with original photographs taken in Zangskar and neighboring regions documenting the locations and details of these enigmatic rock carvings. The photographs represent more than twenty years of fieldwork in Zangskar. They accompany a wide-ranging inquiry into their subject matter, distribution, communication strategies, and relationships with those in surrounding areas. Through archaeology, comparative anthropology and ethnography, and formal analysis, the study, written in accessible prose, demonstrates the connections to hunter- gatherers and later to herders who made them. These drawings on stone once provided a visual legacy in the landscape of contemporary Zangksaris with their economy mixing agriculture and herding, but are fast disappearing with the destructive expansion of road-building and neglect.

Besides more than 150 illustrations, the book comes with a DVD with an additional 143 color illustrations.

Rob Linrothe trained as an art historian at the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in 1992. He taught at Skidmore College in upstate New York for several years and was the first Curator of Himalayan Art at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. Since 2010 he has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. His first off-road trek in Ladakh was in 1983, and since 1990 Linrothe has walked regularly in and through the mountains surrounding Zangskar, documenting and publishing the art preserved in the region, aided by local friends. Besides the Buddhist and pre-Buddhist art of Zangskar. Linrothe's research interests include the development, practice and patronage of Esoteric Buddhist art of eastern India, Tibet and the Western Himalayas.

This book has been gestating for more than twenty years. Although I first went t did some minor trekking to Ladakh in 1983 to and from Alchi, petroglyphs didn't register for me until I hiked into Zangskar and from there to Ladakh in 1990. My next journey on foot across the region, in 1992, whetted my interest in them, and in 1994 1 received a grant from the Asian Cultural Council in large part to study petroglyphs in situ during the summer. Even when I traveled to Ningxia in the People's Republic of China a few times during the 1990s to pursue my study of Tangut art, I encountered prehistoric petroglyphs of masks and animals in the Helan Shan, thanks to Wu Fengyun. My good friend Rana P. B. Singh also brought me to a Neolithic cave painting site near Varanasi in 1996 and again in 2006, stimulating my attentiveness to these signs of early culture. From the first exposure in Zangskar, I began adding a petroglyph layer to my trekking plans each summer that I went to Ladakh and Zangskar, in all over eighteen times, usually for three months, and once, I stayed in Zangskar for nearly six months in the winter of 2003-2004. Each time I have tried to scout new places where these ancient pictures might be likely to have survived, and also to document the dwindling herds of live animals that had been depicted two or three or more millennia earlier. Every time I trek in the region, I add to my knowledge and to my stock of photographs, and as I write I am eagerly anticipating my next sojourn there, in the summer of 2016.

Ireprese representative but hardly exhaustive archive of original photographs of remote sites bearing images carved into stone. Most of those images depict animals, humans, and non-representational designs, none of which are anchored to any historical text, narrative, or known system of religious meaning. They relate and, in some cases, respond to each other better than they do to other media, little or nothing else of which survives from their time of origin. The challenge they pose is to try to understand their nature and significance, both to the people who made them and to subsequent observers. Since, according to our best assessments, these images carved on the rock are pre- and proto- historic, their dates may range from six millennia before the present [BP] (or even earlier) down to the sixth century CE.