"This book offers a brief survey of the history of Nepal recalling why, leaving aside the Kathmandu valley, the sum of knowledge on its material culture lacks the objective distance allowed by other non-European civilizations: the country, long closed to Western visitors, opened but recently, and documents prior to the 1960s are scarce." "Bertrand Goy's research into the archives leads us on the tracks of is statuary, while the ethnologist Gisele Krauskopff shares with us a line of thought supported by her field experience and her knowledge of Nepalese culture. The testimony of a photographer traveller who visited Nepal in the pioneering days completes this volume with Hugues Dubois' photographs of the masks and statuettes collected over the past twenty years by Max Itzikovitz." --Book Jacket.

About the Book : The articles collected in this volume, which were originally presented in the panels on art and epigraphy at the 12th World Sanskrit Conference in Helsinki, Finland, illustrate the depth, diversity and sophistication of recent studies in

Himalayan Bronzes focuses on a complete study of 340 medieval-period copper alloy sculptures from the Himalayan regions of Afghanistan, northern Pakistan, Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Nepal, and Tibet. For more than 1,500 years, artists in isolated valleys in and adjacent to the mountains of the Himalayas have created magnificent copper-based statues representing deities and spiritual leaders of the Hindu, Buddhist and Bon-Po religions. Author Chandra L. Reedy's multidisciplinary approach to the study of these statues integrates methods and techniques from art history, art conservation, geology, chemistry, statistics, archaeology, and ethnography to answer art historical and anthropological questions. Her guiding premise is that gathering and combining several types of information will result in more and better answers than any one type alone.