Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2001 - 65

form of Buddhism. The character of religious life in western Tibet following the
collapse of the Tibetan empire in a.D.
840 is not well understood, but it seems
probable that it was a mixture of Buddhist thought, remnants of Bon (the preBuddhist, indigenous religion of much
of Tibet), and other cults. To Ye-shes-od
and his followers, much of this practice
was degenerate. His reforms included
laws that promulgated and protected
Buddhist practice and its sponsorship,
defined roles for the nobility and commoners, and created the basis for the
establishment
of communities of
ordained monks.
The most important material expression of the reforms was the extraordinary
building campaign that took place across
western Tibet beginning in A.D. 996
through the early eleventh century. It
was during this period that temples were
built that became the primary centers of
Buddhist teaching in western Tibet for
the next 500 years. These buildings were
filled with statuary, their walls painted
with extraordinary art, strongly influenced, indeed painted by, artists from
what is now Kashmir in northern India.
Although my Chinese colleagues
and I are working on sites that are in
some cases 1,000 years old, many have
only entered the archaeological record
recently. When the Italian art historian
Giuseppe Tucci traveled through western Tibet and its borderlands in the
1930s, the temples and other buildings
at Tholing, for example, were essenOther sites - like
tially intact.
a
Tsparang, capital of Guge on the Sutlej River near Tibets modern boundary
with India - were partly ruined, but
unlooted. In 1965, China's Cultural
Revolution spread even to this remote
corner of Tibet. The results were devastating. Party cadres were taken to major
and minor sites, where they systematically smashed statues, defaced art, and
pulled roofs from buildings. Books were
torn apart and burned, centuries-old
sacred objects became mixed with
materials of much more recent age,
making contextual interpretation next
to impossible. At Tholing, a small Mao
pin was found in a deposit at the main
temple, along with materials dating
many centuries earlier.
Piyang is in ruins today, and many of
our excavations have faced similar
problems of context. The site is large,
more than 14 acres, and includes buildings and caves of various sizes and uses
in the surrounding hills. In addition to
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mapping the site, our work has focused
on discovering evidence of the A.D.996
building program. According to historian Roberto Vitali, who has extensively
studied the texts of the period, a temple (or lag-khang) was first established
at Piyang in a.D. 996. It is likely that a
chos-sde (monastic community) was
established there at that time or shortly
thereafter. The records, however, are
contradictory. Some texts state that
only a temple was constructed and that
a monastery was built later, well into
the eleventh century. Consequently,
our first efforts were directed at locating the remains of an early temple, and
determining whether or not a monastic
community was associated with it.
Fortunately, architectural studies of
existing Tibetan and Buddhist temples
provide us with a general model of what
to expect. Anne Chayet, a French
archaeologist and art historian, notes
that early temples tend to be square or
rectangular in plan and composed of
three main parts: an assembly hall,
ambulatory, and cella. The hall serves as
a meeting and worship place, while the
ambulatory is a circuit that a worshiper
walks in clockwise fashion while in
prayer. It usually surrounds the cella, an
interior room that contains sacred
images of the Buddha and other holy figures. The interior walls of these rooms
are lavishly painted with sacred images
and scenes from the life of the Buddha.
Piyang is divided by a small stream.
The western half has buildings of relatively recent date (thirteenth through
seventeenth centuries) and is the site
of the modern village. The eastern side
rests on flat tableland 100 feet above
the valley floor of the Blackwater River,
which drains into the Sutlej. Near the
western edge of this plain lies a large,
rectangular building that we named the
Old Temple. Built of thick adobe
blocks, its walls in some places stand
more than 20 feet high. These walls are
much eroded, but are marked with
niches and holes for statues and supports for the roof. In the westernmost
room we discovered a white platform
with shell-like carved details resembling the seats upon which Buddhas
and bodhisattvas reposed. Near the
original floor of this room was a strip of
decorative wall painting. A sample was
radiocarbon dated to ca. A.D.997. This
room is almost certainly a cella, and, if
so, the large open room to the east is an
assembly hall. Whether we have an
ambulatory, however, is uncertain. In
65

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Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2001

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