Regional connections identified through the analysis of glass beads from Samdzong, Upper Mustang, Nepal, CE 500

Summary

Samdzong is found in the Kali Gandaki drainage in Upper Mustang, Nepal, just to the south of Tibet. Known from historical sources that date to the 17th C., Samdzong was an important waypoint on the salt trade route between South India and the Tibetan Plateau. Aside from salt from the plateau, these documents say little about other materials that were exchanged, and virtually nothing about their places of origin. The antiquity of the salt route was simply assumed. Excavations at the site conducted over the past three years have added both a wider regional scope and a greater time depth to our understanding of trade in this region. Glass beads have contributed much to this improved understanding of regional trade and its local expression at Samdzong. Analyzed by LA-ICP-MS, the beads tell a story of far-flung ties: trade from the west with ancient Sassania (now in modern Iran), the Sindh to the south (now in modern Pakistan), and participation in the Asia-Pacific bead trade that may include production loci in far southern India or southeast Asia. We will describe these results in greater detail and will compare them to the analyses of other artifacts that circulated in this region.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Chronology, Exchange, Identity: Elemental Analysis of Glass Beads for Assessing Regional Interaction

Keywords

Spatial Coverage