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First city site unearthed ‘properly’ at Hazara

By Shehryar Sheikh

LAHORE: Dr Saifur Rehman Dar, an archaeologist and former director of the Lahore Museum, on Thursday gave a presentation on the process he and his team went through in unearthing a city at Hazara.

Mr Dar, in his presentation arranged by the Lahore Arts Forum, claimed this was the first time a Pakistani archeologist had excavated a city site in Pakistan using “proper procedures”.

“History begins in Pakistan - in many ways,” Mr Dar said, adding one lecture could not contain the history of Hazara. He said there are about 30,000 unexcavated sites along the Karakoram Highway, but he had focused on the most recent discoveries in Hazara. “The historical city was once a corridor which linked the subcontinent to China, Kashmir and Central Asia,” he said.

The archaeologist, with the help of slides, showed that Hazara’s old site is located near a village besides a rain-swollen river. “Though the riverbed remains dry as long as there is no rain, but it becomes a furious stream of water when flooded with rain water,” he said.

Mr Dar explained how important “the sense of direction” was to the people who had built the excavated buildings around the 2nd and 3rd century AD. The walls of the buildings were aligned exactly north-south and east-west, showing that the civilisation was quite advanced, he said. He called the architecture “beautifully and aesthetically constructed” when describing one of the buildings.

Mr Dar outlined the structure of a “fortified temple”, which had originally been a single building, and was burnt to the ground and then resurrected and fortified to protect it from outsiders. “It is safe to assume that the people of Hazara had freedom of religious practice, because my team has excavated a Hindu temple, a fire-worshipping site and a monastery within close areas,” he said.

The last few slides demonstrated the processes used by his archeological team. Every unearthed bucket was passed through a fine sieve, and only the mud that passed through the process remained uncatalogued.

Mr Dar said it had been the first time that the international standard of sieving all the mud at a site had been used in Pakistan. Previously, it had been too expensive and archeologists did not have the proper equipment to meet the standards.

Regarding the importance of Muslim influence in the region, Mr Dar said he had unearthed a few broken pots and architectural designs, though it was not his area of focus. “Predominantly, the finds were much older than the time of Islam,” he said.

He said that to know Pakistan, one had to go past the history of the Mongols and the Turks, till the time around the birth of Jesus.

Regular LEAF members were present.

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