Lords of the mountains: pre-Islamic heritage along the Upper Indus in Pakistan is a long-awaited and welcome contribution to the archaeology of South and Central Asia. This monograph makes an important but often marginalised corpus widely accessible. Harald Hauptmann applied the standards he previously set in comprehensive archaeological excavations in Anatolia to rock art of the Upper Indus region—that is: first gather the documentation, only then carry out the analysis.

The book was published in 2024, six years after the author’s death. The author had not made any manuscript revisions and, as a result, the publication has a few shortcomings. The choice to preserve the study in the form in which Hauptmann left it is explained in a note by Luca Maria Olivieri (head of Italian Archaeological Mission in Swat) and one of his long-time colleagues. Aside from the editorial work on the manuscript, Olivieri added details of relevant publications published between 2018 and 2022 in footnotes. The foreword by Hermann Parzinger (currently serving as president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation), who was once Hauptmann’s student, offers some perspectives about the challenges when carrying out archaeological fieldwork in the mountainous area of north Pakistan. As Parzinger puts it, Hauptmann brought decades of research in the Karakoram region to an impressive conclusion. This volume constitutes the scientific legacy of the last phase of his long career.

In 1980, anthropologist Karl Jettmar and archaeologist Ahmad Hasan Dani established the research project ‘Rock carvings and inscriptions along the Karakorum Highway’ at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. A decade later, under the leadership of Hauptmann, the project initiated the systematic survey and documentation of rock art sites in what are now the provinces Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan. From 1989 until 2012, the team recorded rock art evidence in what is a perfect example of a project that we would now label ‘slow science’. It resulted in revealing the existence of more than 7000 stones bearing 45 000 petroglyphs, of which 5000 are inscriptions. During that time, the MANP series (Materials for the Archaeology of the Northern Regions of Pakistan), comprising 11 voluminous catalogues, was published. However, with the high price of the books—due to their large format—their publication in German and only a short summary in Urdu, the rock art corpus was accessible to a limited audience. It is one of the reasons the publication of this monograph (364 pages and 38 tables with colour photographs), in English and as Open Access, is much appreciated.

A map at the beginning of the volume enables readers to locate the major rock art and other archaeological sites discussed, with a complementary list of sites in an index at the end. The synthetic analysis proposed by Hauptmann of such a large corpus of rock art is admirable. He suggests a periodisation, although this is particularly difficult for the north of Pakistan because, in terms of excavation, it is an untouched region. Hauptmann manages to build a chronological sequence thanks to his encyclopaedic knowledge, to which about 1000 items in the bibliography testify. Some readers may regret the use of bibliographic and editorial abbreviations that make the text harder to read for those who are not familiar with the material. In the first part of the monograph the geography of the area is discussed as well as its early explorers, ranging from mainly Buddhist pilgrims up to Marco Polo. A much-needed environmental and geomorphological description of the western Himalayas is provided, which is neglected in other existing studies, thus placing the rock art sites mainly located on both banks of the upper course of the Indus river in their landscape. Hauptmann’s lengthy description of the routes, showing how the sites were interconnected, must also be highlighted.

The second part of the book is a historiographic exercise in which Hauptmann reviews archaeological and anthropological research in the north of Pakistan to the first half of the nineteenth century up to 2013, the year in which the Pak-German Archaeological Mission (PGAM) stopped its activities. With nearly 200 pages, part three is the bulk of the monograph, with the in-depth study of the rock art corpus patiently compiled over 25 years.

Following a chronological order, Hauptmann proceeds to thematic studies. Although not dominant in numbers, mostly the Buddhist imagery of the rock art of the Upper Indus and its accompanying inscriptions received attention from various scholars very early on and continue to do so. In contrast, the rest of the corpus, which makes up the bulk of it, remains largely ignored. Due to his academic background, Hauptmann’s most noticeable contributions here are those dealing with early hunters and gatherers and Iranic connections. In the chapter ‘Merchants of the Silk Road’, he discusses the cultural significance of various symbols carved into the rock (such as crosses, Sasanian patterns and heraldic symbols known as tamga). The chapter ‘Times of change: battle-axe warriors, anti-Buddhist movement’ puts forward an interesting reading of the youngest petroglyphs.

In the Epilogue, Hauptmann writes briefly about the threat of destruction hanging over the cultural heritage of the region with the first mention of the Diamer-Basha Dam project in 1980. Thanks to his relentless efforts, Hauptmann managed to include the rock art sites on the World Monument Watch List in 2010. Unfortunately, in 2020, two years after his passing, Hauptmann’s worst fear materialised: the building of the hydroelectric dam was initiated and much of the rock art will be submerged once it is completed. Hauptmann may not have succeeded in preserving the rock art sites in situ, but he had a long-lasting impact on Pakistani and international archaeologists who are now trying their best not to be ‘doomed by the dam’. Even after so many years of research, and with Hauptmann’s legacy, much of the rock art is still undergoing systematic record before its impending destruction. Then, eventually, the time of more analysis will arrive.