In Pursuit of Pre-/Protohistory: Simone Corbiau’s Unsuccessful Archaeological Expedition to the North-West Frontier Province of British India

This paper adds to the history of Indian archaeology a new chapter. It discusses and analyzes Simone Corbiau’s archaeological expedition to North-West Frontier Province and the Malakand Political Agency in 1938. Corbiau was a Belgian archaeologist having interest in pre-/protohistoric terracottas. In the first place, we give a scholarly background to her research so as to understand the importance of the work. In the early 1930s, D.H. Gordon published some terracotta objects from the then NWFP and Corbiau’s disagreement with him about dating the materials brought her into India in 1936. She did fieldwork and its results were immediately published. Corbiau visited India for the second time in 1938 but her expedition this time could not meet success. She made an unsuccessful attempt to work at Malakand and Swat, in addition to Peshawar, Mardan and Swabi, and it is this obscured story in the history of the area’s archaeology that this paper entirely deals with. We argue that despite the desperate support provided by the Archaeological Survey of India to the party, colonial geostrategic politics coupled with some inherent operational shortcomings in the project doomed it to failure.