Around the tombs 1

The burial grounds originally included various attachments: guardian figures (stone lions, namely at #0032, #0339, but see also #0105), stone monuments (rdo ring, with or without inscription) or rock inscription (#0065). The inscription steles above refer to the stele remains situated at a tomb in Mchad kha (#0115), the “rdo ring at the ”Phyong rgyas bridge” (now kept elsewhere in ’Phyong rgyas township, #0032), the rdo ring at the tomb of btsan po Khri Lde srong btsan, and the Zhol stele (the latter probably originally a tombstone in Sri, see site #0157), and the fragments of the Khrom chen rdo ring (#0339). A similar inscription stone was arguably in Sleb, where only the base remained (#0092). Other architectural attachments or auxiliary buildings included step constructions (see “around the tombs 2”), walled enclosures (#0015), sacrificial pits or trenches, and even house constructions as noted in archaeological surveys (see Tong 2008: 97; the houses may concern the ring khang, i.e. the house for concealing (preserving?) the corpse, ring mkhyud, see Dotson 2009: 83). Chinese sources speak of the planting of trees and the erection of shrines on top of the mounds “for ancestral sacrifices” (Haarh 1969: 346), which are no longer traceable, unless we see the yul lha shrines to be found in some fields as a distant echo of this “tradition” (see “marked tombs”).