By Lawrence Joffe

The Guardian, Tuesday 31 March 2009

Professor Ahmad Hasan Dani, who has died aged 88, was Pakistan's leading archaeologist and an authority on south and central Asian archaeology and history. Whether addressing international conferences or guiding schoolchildren on cultural rambles around Islamabad, Dani conveyed an enthusiasm for learning that was infectious.

In 1945 he had worked with the great British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler on the ruins at Moenjodaro, the 4,500-year-old city settlement in Sindh province, southern Pakistan. Dani revealed fascinating details about the site, proclaiming it "the first planned city in the world" and demonstrating that its Indus Valley civilisation was one of humanity's great foundational cultures, alongside Egypt, Mesopotamia and China. He described a sophisticated people who understood irrigation, traded with Arabia and ruled from Afghanistan to Rajasthan. He also showed how they practised yoga and created statuettes of bangled dancing girls and stern-faced priest-kings that delight viewers to this day.

Rejecting academic super-specialisation, Dani synthesised disciplines to reconstruct the distant past. He was fluent in 15 languages, including French, Tamil and Turkish. He wrote 30 books. His last publication, a History of Pakistan (2007), which culminates in the republic's creation in 1947, encapsulates 50 years of research.

Dani was born in Basna, a village near Raipur, in central India. His parents were Kashmiri by origin and Ahmad was the first in his family to be educated. He studied Sanskrit at Banaras Hindu University, graduating as its first Muslim student in 1944. He excavated with Wheeler at Moenjodaro and Gandhara and worked at the Department of Archaeology of British India at the Taj Mahal, Agra, before leaving for East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1947.

From 1950 to 1962, Dani was East Bengal's superintendent of archaeology, a history professor at Dhaka University and the curator at Dhaka museum. He compiled definitive works on Bengali Muslim architecture between completing his PhD thesis on the prehistory of eastern India at London University in 1955, and working as a research fellow at the School of African and Oriental Studies (1958-59).

Dani left for Peshawar University, where he created the department of archaeology and became its first professor. In 1971 he established the social sciences faculty at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, serving as dean until his retirement in 1980. In 1993 he established the Islamabad museum.

From the 1960s, Dani shone light on Graeco-Indian remains in northern Pakistan. At the ancient city of Taxila, descendants of Alexander the Great's troops had mixed with locals, adopted Buddhism and crafted statues and temples that bore unmistakable traces of an Aegean provenance. In 1997 Dani became founding director of the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisations.

He also supervised exploration of a shrine at Murree, a hill station in Pakistani Punjab. Some believe it houses the remains of Mary, mother of Jesus.

At Rehman Dheri and Baluchistan, he helped unearth traces of a proto-urban civilisation that may predate Mesopotamia by millennia. From 1978 he and German colleagues discovered rock art from the Karakoram mountains dating back 40,000 years. In 2007 he alighted on a human footprint, possibly a million years old, imprinted in sandstone near the Margalla hills, north of Islamabad.

Often Dani swam against the tide. He suggested that Sufi meditation derived from earlier Buddhist customs; proved a casket bearing an alleged ancient Persian princess was a fake; and disputed the theory that today's southern Indians descend from Indus Valley refugees driven out by marauding Aryans.

He led path-breaking Unesco expeditions along the old Silk Road to China in 1990 and the Soviet Union in 1991. He popularised history through newspaper articles and ran cultural trips for Pakistanis as well as European, American and Japanese tourists, and lectured internationally.

Imploring Pakistanis to celebrate their pre-Islamic ancestors, Dani criticised nationalists and religious zealots who destroyed traces of preceding cultures. He also insisted that his countrymen radically reappraise their outlook on history.

The greatest influence on Pakistan, he argued, was neither the Hindu south nor the Arab west but central Asia, in its Buddhist, Persian and later Sufi guises. As chair of the Pakistan-Central Asia Friendship Association, he wanted to revive "a genuine relationship - cultural, historical, commercial as well as religious", and advocated reopening routes to the north that Soviet rule had shut down in 1920.

Dani's many international awards included the Légion d'honneur in 1998. He is survived by his wife of 60 years, Safiya Sultana, sons Anis, Navaid and Junaid, daughter Fauzia, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

• Ahmad Hasan Dani, archaeologist, linguist and historian, born 20 July 1920; died 26 January 2009