The School of Anthropology and Conservation is hosting a special talk entitled Mountains, Monoliths and Shamans provided by John Vincent Bellezza, an expert on Tibetan culture and religion. The event will take place on Tuesday 12th June at 15:30 in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 2.
This lecture describes the vast network of castles, temples, megaliths, necropolises and rock art established on the highest and now depopulated part of the Tibetan plateau documented by John Vincent Bellezza between 1992 and 2016. These impressive remains chart a unique paleocultural world in Upper Tibet hardly known to science until Bellezza began his explorations. He relates literary tales of priests and priestesses, horned deities, and the celestial afterlife to the actual archaeological evidence, providing a fascinating perspective on the origins and development of a civilisation that flourished long before Buddhism took root in Tibet.
John Vincent Bellezza is an archaeologist and cultural historian specialising in the pre-Buddhist heritage of Upper Tibet. He has lived in high Asia for three decades and is a Research Fellow at the University of Virginia (USA) and Bern University (Switzerland). Bellezza has written twelve books and many articles on the ancient monuments, rock art and ritual traditions of territories associated with the Zhang Zhung and Sumpa proto-states, revealing the surprising level of cultural and technical sophistication attained on the uppermost reaches of the Tibetan Plateau more than 2000 years ago. For more information about his work, see www.tibetarchaeology.com.