The described events, investigations and results contained in this report are the results of an archaeological salvage campaign which occurred between March 31^st and April 30^th 1999 in a central region of the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. For the sake of clarity, and since for most readers, Bhutan is an unknown territory, we added some contextual information about this country, its history, and its population.

Many institutions contributed to the organization, the logistics, the campaign and this reporting ¹:

A few buried stone structures were discovered incidentally on the building site of a new planned agronomic research center (RNR-RC) in Jakar, central Bhutan. Helvetas, which is financing and coordinating the building work, reported the findings to the Ministry for Agriculture in the capital city Thimpu. Parts of the structures are located in immediate vicinity of the planned buildings, thus threatened of dismantling. The architect and workers of the RNR-RC building site partly uncovered two of the structures and documented briefly the deepest one. Those preliminary observations lead to the decision to shift the locations of the two first new buildings; this step was implemented, thus saving a massive and deep located stone structure from destruction and enabling the continuation of the building work. On demand of the Minister for Agriculture, Helvetas mandated the SLFA for a rapid archaeological expertise, in order to establish the importance of the site and of the structures. The decision to ask a foreign institution to proceed to this investigation was made mainly because of the nonexistence of any archaeological survey in the Kingdom of Bhutan.  Personal relationship between the former Helvetas coordinator in Bhutan, Mr. Peter König, and the SLFA Secretary general, Dr. Eberhard Fischer, lead to the implementation of the operation.

Helvetas submitted the project to the SLFA in February 1999. Information was exchanged mutually in Bhutan between the Ministry for Agriculture, the RNR-RC Jakar, the Special Commission for Cultural Affairs, and Helvetas. In Switzerland, Helvetas and the SLFA coordinated the preparation. This lead to this archaeological campaign, the first ever carried out on the territory of the Kingdom of Bhutan. The sojourn of the Swiss archaeological team in Bhutan was voluntarily limited to four weeks. Preliminary briefings, coordination and information meetings between the different instances were the only events that shortened the effective fieldwork to nineteen days. The campaign ended with an internal debriefing conference given by the author to the Council of the Ministry for Agriculture as well as to the responsible partners of Helvetas, RNR-RC Jakar, and SCCA. This gave the archaeologist the opportunity to present an overview of the main results obtained during the short investigation. Unavoidable proposals concerning the measures, which must be taken to preserve the integrity of the investigated structures, were also submitted to the parties during this last event.

The present investigation report is submitted to Helvetas, to the Ministry of Agriculture, to the Special Commission for Cultural Affairs, as well as to the Secretary General of the SLFA. It is also published in the 1998 Annual Report of the SLFA (Zurich and Vaduz).

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Copyright 2000 by Blumer R. and Vial F. 
Copyright 1999 by SLFA Zürich, Switzerland.
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Last updated: 29-05-2001.