Excavations at the Protohistoric Graveyards of Gogdara and Udegram

The protohistoric graveyards of north-western Pakistan, and particularly of the Swat Valley, have been the subject of extensive archaeological research since the early 1960s, but their chronology and some other issues are still debated, among which their relationship with broader regional ethnic and cultural changes. Such valley and neighbouring areas are in fact crucial for the social changes that occurred in Central Asia and in the Indo-Pakistani sub-continent from the late Bronze Age to the Iron Age between the 2nd and the 1st millennium BC. Recent excavations of two graveyards at Gogdara IV and Udegram in the Swat Valley have provided new dating evidence and a much better understanding both of grave structure and treatment of the dead. The book presents the archaeological results of the research at both sites and investigates a number of issues related to funerary practices (wooden architecture of graves, multiple episodes of deposition and the reopening of graves, removal or addition of body parts, secondary burial, presence of perishable items among grave goods, chronology of graves). New evidence provides an image of the graveyards and of local funerary practices which is very different to that offered by previous research. The complexity of the funerary practices reveals the prolonged interaction between the living and the dead in protohistoric Swat.