National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

scrub and lined by tamarisks; this is obviously one of the former beds of the
Bāhū river. It has been closed in places by low dams meant to catch rain-water
and thus to facilitate cultivation, now abandoned.

The cairns, as already stated, vary considerably in construction. Some of
them are built with roughly rectangular walls formed of irregular slabs of free-
stone rising to 4 or 5 feet in height. The space enclosed by these walls measures
usually from 5 to 6 feet square and is filled with loose earth, over which large
flat stones have been laid to form a kind of roofing. Frequently one of the side
walls shows a small opening similarly roofed over, and intended to represent
an entrance. Some of the cairns of this type found near Group II, at the foot of
the southernmost hillock, had their roofing stones removed (Fig. 22). They
appear to have been among those which Major Mockler had opened and
described as 'small houses'. Often the walls, set up without earth or plaster
between the courses, have fallen away, leaving the cairns in the condition of
shapeless stone heaps. Cairns of another and very frequent type present the
appearance of mere small mounds of closely packed uncut stones, arranged in a
rough circle or oval. But in their case, too, there is always an interior space
containing loose earth heaped over the burial deposits. It will be seen from
this that the types of construction used for these burial cairns correspond closely
to those observed at the large burial-grounds examined on my former Makrān
tour at the sites of Jīwanrī and Zangīān.⁸

The same remark applies to the character of the deposits found within the
cairns, of which altogether forty-two were opened. On the day after our arrival
at Balūr Māch, Mīr Aḥmad Khān, the aged chief of Qal'a-i-Bāhū, had joined us,
and with his readily offered help it became possible to collect from the few
scattered hamlets east of the river the needful number of labourers for trial
excavations. After starting these daily I was able to leave their supervision
to Dr. Fábri for the rest of the time, and thus became free for the long rides
which were to acquaint me with other old remains Mīr Aḥmad Khān knew of
in this tract. The cairns chosen for examination belonged to three distinct
groups, those marked II and III being situated near the foot and top, respectively,
of the southernmost hillock, and that marked IV on the slope of the one farthest
away to the north-east.

The objects found in the cairns of all three groups were of the same general
character, though the extent of deposits varied. They comprised throughout
fragments of human bones, usually small, none showing signs of burning. Close
to these there were placed, usually against the enclosing wall of the cairn, either
complete pottery vessels or potsherds of varying sizes. The former were