On the Cultural Ecology of Sky Burial on the Himalayan Plateau

This is Dan Martin's own scholarly article on why sky burial arose and persists in Tibet, published in East and West, the peer reviewed journal of Rome's Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente, in 1996. Martin works from documented history, tracing European travellers' accounts of the rite from the fourteenth century forward and a 1793 Manchu attempt to suppress it, sets it beside Zoroastrian corpse exposure practice in Iran, and argues an ecological explanation grounded in the Himalayan plateau's scarce arable land, frozen ground and scarce fuel, tying the custom to the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Gcod. Its strength is that it draws documented history, comparative religion and material ecology into one sustained scholarly argument for the practice's origin and persistence, rather than asserting a single cause. Its limit is that it is one scholar's 1996 synthesis and does not itself document the rite's current, state regulated practice, a separate claim this atlas records and does not lean on this article to support. This record previously carried a fabricated title and publisher matching no real publication; it is corrected here to the real article, verified against two independent live web reads agreeing on the same journal, volume and pages and a detailed third party account of its actual argument.