Sky Caves of Nepal

Tomb 5, Aldenderfer theorized, was the burial plot of a high-ranking person, perhaps a local leader. The tomb, it turned out, held two bodies—an adult male and a child, maybe ten years old. The youth was a source of much speculation. “I don’t want to characterize the child as any kind of sacrifice or slave because I really don’t have a clue,” says Aldenderfer. “But a child in there does suggest a complex ritual.”

When Eng, the team’s bone sleuth, took a close look at the remains, she made a startling discovery: The bones of 76 percent of all the individuals she examined bore the unmistakable scars of knife slices. These marks, says Eng, were clearly made after death. “This wasn’t hacking and whacking,” she says. The bones were relatively whole and lacked signs of deliberate breakage and burning. “All the evidence,” Eng notes, “indicates there was no cannibalism here.”

The bones date from the third to the eighth centuries—before Buddhism came to Mustang—but the defleshing may be related to the Buddhist practice of sky burial. To this day, when a citizen of Mustang dies, the body may be sliced into small pieces, bones included. These are all swiftly snatched up by vultures.

In the age of the Samdzong cave burials, Aldenderfer posits, the body was stripped of flesh but the bones were still articulated—“like a Halloween skeleton,” he says. The skeleton was lowered into the tomb and folded to fit in the wooden box. “Then whoever was down there with him,” says Aldenderfer, “climbed back out.”

Before doing so, the ancient burial crew had made sure the corpse was regally adorned for the great beyond. As Athans hunched inside Tomb 5, sifting through dust for hour upon hour, he discovered these adornments. “It was so mesmerizing,” he says, “that I forgot to eat or drink.”

A trove of beads, the garment they’d been sewn on long disintegrated, was scooped up by Athans and placed in plastic sample bags. Singh Lama painstakingly sorted them. There were more than a thousand beads, made of glass, some as minuscule as poppy seeds, in a half dozen hues. As lab studies later showed, the beads were of various origins: some from what is now Pakistan, some from India, some from Iran.

Three iron daggers, with gracefully curved hilts and heavy blades, also emerged. Then a bamboo teacup with delicate circular handle. A copper bangle. A small bronze mirror. A copper cooking pot and a ladle and a three-legged iron pot stand. Bits of fabric. A pair of yak or cow horns. An enormous copper cauldron, roomy enough to boil a beach ball. “I’m betting that’s a chang pot,” said Aldenderfer, referring to the regional beer made of fermented barley.