The Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan.

T he Mission has been active since 1955 and is amongst the longest-running archaeological missions in Asia. Since its foundation, the Mission has concentrated mainly in the Swat Valley, in ancient Gandhara. To speak of Gandhara in connection with the history of the Mission means talking first of all about Giuseppe Tucci, who, with a happy intuition, launched archaeological campaigns in the Swat valley, which was then an autonomous kingdom ruled by the enlightened Miangul family. In 1969 the Swat State was merged into Pakistan. Today, the Mission is a coordinated activity between ISMEO and the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. The funding sources come mainly from these two institutions as well as from the Ministry of University and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Mission collaborates with the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums (DoAM), Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in a framework agreement with the federal authorities of Pakistan.

The Italian Mission is known internationally for studying Gandharan art and archaeology, settlement and funerary archaeology from protohistory to the Islamic and pre-modern periods, rock art, and archival studies. Recent developments in the work of the Mission are the study of paleoclimate (with an ongoing project funded by the Ca' Foscari University of Venice) and genomics and bio-archaeology in collaboration with Harvard Medical School and the Max Planck Institute. Swat, with its data collected by the Mission, is among the best-studied areas of the ancient world in terms of DNA. An outstanding article on this topic was published in Science in September 2019. From 2011 to 2016, the Mission also executed the ACT-Field School Project in Swat, a Pakistan-Italy Debt Swap Agreement-funded project which...