Nov. 29 – It’s an important success for Italian archeology in Pakistan: a pre-Buddhist necropolis was discovered in Udegram, in the Swat valley in the north-west of the country, dating back to a period between 1500 and 500 BCE. The discovery, which took place under the “Act-Fieldschool” (Archeology, community, tourism) program, was coordinated by an Italian archaeological mission, headed by Professor Luca Olivieri from IsIAO, in collaboration with the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Padua. The Swat Valley, an area in which Italy has been present since 1954, shows traces of the passage of Alexander the Great’s troops, dating back to his conquest of Asia. According to experts, the radiocarbon is able to date the tombs around 1300-1200 BCE, approximately the same period identified by philologists in which the oldest variants of the Indo-European language emerged in the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent. The excavation will reconstruct in detail the burial customs of ancient peoples of Swat. Also in Udegram, the project is carrying out the restoration of one of the oldest mosques in Pakistan, built at the beginning of the eleventh century by the Afghan conqueror Mahmoud of Ghazni.
