History of Archaeological Research in Afghan Sistan

This chapter traces the historical and archaeological study of Afghan Sistan from the time of European travelers in the 19th century to the present. Numerous English and other European visitors to Sistan in the 19th century wrote journals of their travels. The border location of Sistan meant that the various Afghan boundary commissions of the 1880s and subsequent decades spent much time in the area, including surveyor G.P. Tate, who wrote the first extensive research volume on Sistan in 1910. Archaeological work was slow in coming: a brief French mission and excavation in the 1930s, American Walter Fairservis’s survey in 1949-50, and work by British archaeologist Norman Hammond, German scholar Klaus Fischer, and American George Dales in the 1950s and 1960s. The only archaeologist to visit Sistan after the Helmand Sistan Project was Mark Abramiuk, working with the US military in 2010-2011. Much more extensive work has taken place in Iranian Sistan by Italian and Iranian teams, though with different emphases and results than in Afghan Sistan.