Dr. Shawe in his house, and photographed by Miss Duncan.' This time we could n of find a single pot with painted designs in the grave. But there were linear ornamen is impressed on several of them. The only places in Ladakh, besides the graves, where similar hand-made pottery with dark red ornaments has been found, are the ancient ruined castles of sBalu mkhar and Alchi mkhar gog. A plate showing such pottery is reproduced in my article " Archeological Notes on sBalu mkhar." 2 Another collection of such ornamental sherds was made at Alchi mkhar gog on our expedition and brought to Simla. These ornaments are all of a very primitive type. They consist of spirals, ladders, and a zigzag band ; and occasionally there are bunches of lines which may represent grass or reeds.
As most of the pots bad holes in their bottoms, I was led to believe that they had fallen down from some higher position, probably from wooden boards (as are said to exist in the rGya graves). When the irrigation water entered, the boards decayed and gave way. As I had previously observed, when examining the graves with Dr. Shawe, most of the pots were filled with human bones. This circumstance seems to indicate that the ancient inhabitants of the Leh valley indulged in the gruesome practice of cutting the corpses to pieces and filling clay pots with the fragments. This custom, which is also found in other parts of the globe, is asserted by the Chinese to have been in vogue in the " Empire of the Eastern Women." Some of the pots had old cracks and carefully bored holes on both sides of them. Thus the art of mending broken pottery with strings must have been known to the race which built these graves.
There were, it appears, between fifteen and twenty skulls in one single grave (Plate XXVII I, b) . Row many, exactly, it is difficult to state now, as we were not the first to examine the grave. When we opened a grave in 1903, Dr. Shawe carried home three of the skulls. He took measurements of them and writes with regard to them in his letter of the 14th November 1905, as follows : " All the skulls I got are very decidedly egg-shaped. The measurements taken with an ordinary pair of compasses (we have no proper ` callipers ' here) along the antero-posterior and longest transverse diameter of the roof of the skull are (approximately) 64 X 5 inches, 64 X 54 inches, and 64 X 54 inches. Against these, the similar measurements of a skull which I got in Baltistan from a Musulman grave, presumably that of a Balti, are 66 X 58 inches." If we convert these measurements into the ordinary centigrade formulas of cephalic indexes, we obtain the following numbers : three skulls from the Leh grave : 71,70 ; 77,77 ; and 77,77. Balti skull 82,82. Unfortunately, on our visit to Leh last year, even a pair of compasses could not be obtained, and I therefore cannot give any numbers. But as I have acquired an experienced eye for forms of skulls, I venture to state that all the skulls we found in the grave last year, were most distinctly dolichocephalic, and the formulas 74 W 77 would probably suit them all. We had also an opportunity to compare them with two skulls taken by Mr. Schmitt from the graves below Leli which date
1
This photograph was reproduced in Miss Duncan's "A Summer Ride through Western Tibet," p. 148, where the painted ornament appears quite distinctly.
2 Ind. Ant., Vol. XXXIV, pp. 203 $.
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