Excavations at the protohistoric graveyards of Gogdara and Udegram

The protohistoric graves of Swat, Dir, Buner and the nearby valleys have always been well known by the local inhabitants, who for centuries used to unearth them by the thousands in their land, searching curiously for the graves’ contents. Nowadays, farmers of these areas still remove stone cists, bones and vessels whenever they have to enlarge or maintain their fields, or just look for unlikely treasures. In spite of the usual and expected legends, the protohistoric graves – as far as the antiquarian market is concerned - are generally rather poor. They rarely contain valuable finds such as ornaments in precious metals and semiprecious stones, and the ceramics that may be fascinating to the historian and the archaeologists, in their severe look, dull colors, and very limited decoration have little appeal for local traders and even less for foreign collectors. The protohistoric material culture of the region, in short, is threatened by economic development and agriculture, and only as a secondary consequence by illegal digging for commercial purposes. However, the destruction of the protohistoric cemeteries of the whole region is massive and relentless, for the simple reasons that the funerary sites are widespread, both in the piedmont strips and in the alluvial terraces. Many burial grounds contained hundreds of graves, while the current demographic growth constantly pushes the contemporary urban settlements into areas of great archaeological interest. Also, the intensification of agriculture and land management by the means of earthworks of variable scale (mainly by cutting the local substrata for creating new systems of terraces) has a major negative impact on the survival of this ancient heritage. The Swat graveyards of the 2nd-1st millennia BCE came to the attention of the archaeological world in the early 1960s, when the Italian explorer and orientalist Giuseppe Tucci, after a survey in November-December 1955, selected this valley as the focus of his future archaeological interests (Olivieri 2006a, Id. 2006b; Id. 2011a in Ghani-ur-Rahman and Olivieri 2011). For Tucci, whose great insight always envisaged the major framework of history and cultural evolution behind the contingencies of material relics, the settlements and graves of the latest prehistory of Swat had witnessed not only the rise of one of the most important, epochal cradles of Buddhism, but also the ancient peoples that the soldiers of Alexander the Great met and fought in 327 BCE. Callieri (in Ghani-ur-Rahman and Olivieri 2011: 1-15) well stressed the impressive modernity of Tucci’s vision, when the co-founder of IsMEO placed the unbroken cultural evolution of Swat, from prehistory to the advent of Islam, as a primary goal of research, rather than focusing on a single prestigious site or monument, or selecting a favorite historical phase against the others.