Luca Maria Olivieri

Luca Maria Olivieri

Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan
2013 Grant Recipient
luca m olivieri

Sir Aurel Stein and the 'Lord of the Marches' : New Archival Material
PUBLISHED 2015

Luca M. Olivieri is director of the ISMEO Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan. He has been working in Swat for more than thirty years. His principal interests include excavation, survey, and heritage management methodologies. In 2017 he was awarded with the Sitara-i-Imtiaz of Pakistan for his three decades of archaeological work in Swat. He has been Director of the ACT-Field School Project in Swat from 2011 to 2016, which, amongst other important achievements in the field of training, archaeology and restoration, managed to rebuild the Swat Museum, as well as to restore the colossal Jahanabad Buddha, both damaged during the insurgency. Dr. Olivieri has been working in Swat since 1987, mainly focusing on the still on-going excavation project at the urban site of Bir-kot-ghwandai (Barikot), the ancient Bazira of Alexander the Great, on rock-art field-research, and on the Archaeological Map of the Swat Valley project.

L.M. Olivieri's Project with the Shelby White and Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications: In 2008, during the cataloguing of some pre-Partition documents at Malakand Fort - in the former North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan - the author unveiled a significant group of unpublished documents referring to archaeological matters. The archival study, focused on three folders containing a total of 348 documents covering a period spanning from 1895 to 1937. Some of these documents are connected to the explorations of Sir Aurel Stein in Swat. A first group is linked to his 1926 trip to Swat and to his identification of the Indian Aornos of Alexander’s historians. Some of Stein's writings are preserved as original autographed manuscripts. The other three groups are related to three failed plans by Stein to carry out new explorations in Swat in 1928, in 1931, and in 1933 (the last one was unknown to the biographers of Stein). The work (Olivieri, Luca Maria, Sir Aurel Stein and the 'Lords of the Marcjhes'. New Archival Material, [Lahore, Pakistan, Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2015], pp. 402.) presents the archival material in chronological order, and - through them - attempts to reconstruct the history of the archaeology of the Malakand area and Swat.

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