西喜马拉雅是青藏高原与亚洲大陆中部山结地带相连接的极高地区,包括现今中国西藏西部的阿里高原、印度西北部、巴基斯坦北部、尼泊尔西北部。平均海拔约4500米,有“世界屋脊的屋脊”之称,属干旱内陆亚洲的腹心地带。
In recent years, Chinese archaeologists conducted a series of surveys and excavations in western Tibet, by which some remains before the Tubo Empire were revedled, which showed that the features of the early cultures in this region were different from that of the cultures in the central and eastern Tibet. In the last 20 years, the archaeological work to the south of Himalayas was also just started, which also found remains with roughly same dates with the archaeological remains in western Tibet. Considering that the western Tibet in a broader sense has been a relatively intact "historic world", these archaeological finds are suitable to be discussed as a whole to reveal the developments of the early civilizations in the mountainous western Himalaya region and the cultural interactions in the relatively isolated geographic areas. Aimed on this, focused on the early burials found in western Tibet in recent years and compared with the archaeological materials of the northwestern Nepal and northwestern India, this paper preliminarily divided the archaeological remains before the 7th century AD found in western Himalaya region into three phases (13th to 6th centuries BC, 6th century BC to 2nd century AD and 2nd to 6th centuries AD), summarized the pottery assemblages of these phases and areas, and trans-regionally compared the location selection of cemeteries, funeral customs and grave goods; with the results of these studies, this paper pointed out that in the late 1st millennium BC to the early 1st millennium AD, similar burial cultures were distributed in the western Himalaya area, from which clear cultural elements of eastern Tibet and Tarim Basin are seen, reflecting the important role played by the longdistance trans-Himalayan trade lasted to the present in the early stage of the social development in the mountainous areas. This paper also identified the ethnic attribution of the archaeological remains mentioned above, and believed that they belonged neither to "Mon" nor to "Dard", but the most p