'Frontier Archaeology': Sir Aurel Stein, Swat, and the Indian Aornos

In the years 2008–10, during the cataloguing of some pre-Partition documents in the provincial archives of Pakistan, a corpus of unpublished documents referring to archaeological matters came to the light. The corpus also contains 26 letters by Sir Aurel Stein, some of them copies, others in original autographed manuscripts. These archival 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 with Mt. Pir-sar. A second group is related to three failed plans by Stein to carry out new explorations in Swat, a goal that he eventually accomplished only in 1941 when he was 79. The three attempts occurred respectively in 1928, in 1931, and in 1933.