Harigaon Revisited Chronicle and Outcomes of an Excavation in Kathmandu: Followed By a Study on the Statue From Maligaon Its Restoration and Its Inscription

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The idea of writing this book stemmed out from the need to rethink an excavation carried out in Kathmandu in years now distant from the people who took part in it and even more distant from the recent history of Nepal. Today the Valley of Nepal in Kathmandu is a profoundly different place from what it was in the 1980s, and in many ways unrecognisable. The idea of the book, however, is also due to the long-term consequences of the situation created in Italy between 2008 and 2011, the year in which the Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente (IsIAO), sonship of the Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (IsMEO), closed down. The latter had been established in 1933 by Giovanni Gentile and then directed for a long time by Giuseppe Tucci. Both Institutes, as far as field activities in Asia were concerned, were in close relationship with the Museo Nazionale di Arte Orientale, where the documentation of the excavations was deposited, in particular the graphic and photographic material (drawings of all kinds, negatives and prints). In 2016 the Museum left its headquarters in the very central Via Merulana in Rome and was joined to the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini, merging into the new Museo delle Civiltà, where today the largest part of the documentation of the archaeological undertakings of the past is kept, waiting to be rearranged and made usable.

Most of the documentation of the Harigaon excavations is held in the present-day Dipartimento Asia Africa e Mediterraneo of the Università "L'Orientale" in Naples, which financially supported the archaeological activity in Nepal. A copy of the documentation, along with the finds from the excavations, is deposited in the Department of Archaeology in Kathmandu. The pandemic seriously affected the possibility of accessing graphic and photographic materials, and for this book, which began to be handled early in 2020, only the documentation provided by the excavation reports published in 1988 and 1992 was available. Every effort was made to refresh it for a book planned to provide the students interested in the ancient history of Nepal a more agile tool than the Final Report of 1992, taking the opportunity to also provide new studies on the statue bearing on the pedestal the name Jayavarman that was found in 1992 at Maligaon, a short distance from the excavation sites at Harigaon. The statue, found in fragments, was restored by the Nepali-Italian team in Patan and then secured in a room of the National Museum of Kathmandu where an anti- seismic system as simple as it showed to be effective was implemented. This book is dedicated to the restorer Elio Paparatti, a dear friend and lifelong collaborator of mine who passed away in 2020, to whom the drawings of the finds from the Harigaon excavations are also due.

In the first part of the book, a narrative in which the fieldwork's various stages are mainly seen from a personal point of view, I have recalled the names of some officials of the Department of Archaeology such as Janak Lal Sharma and Shaphalya Amatya, who, heading the Department, had the obligation to monitor our activity. I also wish to mention the senior archaeologists Tara Nanda Mishra, Riddhi Pradhan, then a young lady, and Kosh Prasad Acharya, who all would hold the position of Director General, as well as Shobha Shrestha, a clever, attentive official.