Sacred Steinkerns: Shaligram Shilas as a Living Geomyth, and the Palaeontological Consequences of Devotional Custody

This paper looks at Shaligram shilas, the black spiral stones from Nepal's Kali Gandaki river that Hindus worship as forms of Vishnu, from two sides. As geology, they are Late Jurassic ammonoid fossils. The paper traces them from the Spiti Shale sea floor on the edge of the Tethys ocean, through uplift of the Himalaya, to being rounded in the river. It shows that each feature ritual requires (black colour, smooth surface, visible spiral) has a specific preservation cause. As a geomyth, the paper argues they don't fit Vitaliano's "explanatory myth" category. It proposes a new type, the "custodial geomyth," for sacred meaning carried by a portable object that the tradition classifies carefully and requires families to keep. Three adolescent co-authors interviewed 35 Hindu households in Hyderabad (31 analysed). Grandparents knew as much about the fossil origin as young people did, but they learned it from tradition, while young people found it online. Knowing the stone is a fossil almost never weakened reverence, and almost no one would sell theirs. The paper ends by weighing this informal protection against the fact that collecting is itself extraction, and against new geoheritage restrictions in Mustang.