Abdul Samad

Abdul Samad (born 1981, debated) is a Pakistani archaeologist and civil servant from Kohat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who serves as director general of archaeology and museums in the province. Trained at the University of Peshawar and the Free University of Berlin, he taught at Hazara University before taking charge of the province's archaeology directorate in 2014, authored Emergence of Hinduism in Gandhara, and received the Presidential Pride of Performance in 2018. ^{1 2}

Samad hails from Jungle Khel, Kohat. He took an MA in archaeology from the University of Peshawar, graduating first in his class and winning a gold medal, then won a DAAD scholarship to the Free University of Berlin, where he completed his PhD in 2011, specialising in Gandhara art, numismatics and South Asian languages and cultures; he also studied Sanskrit. A Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship took him to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Before joining the civil service he taught archaeology at Hazara University in Mansehra for almost ten years, and he has been associated with excavations at the Bhamala Buddhist complex. His doctoral research, published as Emergence of Hinduism in Gandhara, examined the emergence of Hinduism in ancient Gandhara from archaeological evidence. ^{1 2}

In June 2014 Samad was appointed director of the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — among the youngest to hold the post — and later became its director general and secretary, also heading the Peshawar Museum and directing the World Bank-assisted KITE tourism project. He is credited with recording over 200 new archaeological sites in the Chitral valley alone and with setting up and upgrading museums across the province. In 2018 he received the Presidential Pride of Performance for archaeology. In February 2019 the National Accountability Bureau arrested him on allegations of misuse of authority in appointments at archaeological sites; the Peshawar High Court granted him bail on 15 May 2019, he resumed duty the next day, and the provincial government reinstated him as director. No source read for this record names a faith or religious school for Abdul Samad — his research subject, the emergence of Hinduism in Gandhara, is his scholarly field, not his faith — and this record records none. ^{1 3}

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