From Cunningham's Survey to a National Institution

Alexander Cunningham, a retired British army engineer with a longstanding interest in Indian antiquities, was appointed the first Archaeological Surveyor to the Government of India in 1861, tasked with systematically surveying, mapping and recording the subcontinent's ancient monuments, a role that grew over subsequent decades into the permanent institution now known as the Archaeological Survey of India. Cunningham and his early successors identified and excavated many of the sites now central to the study of Indian religious history, including several major Buddhist stupas and the first Indus Valley sites recognized as belonging to a civilization then unknown to history, work that placed the Survey at the center of nearly every major religious archaeological discovery on the subcontinent for more than a century.

The Survey continued as a department of British colonial government until Indian independence in 1947, when it was reconstituted under the new Government of India and given statutory authority through the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958, which defines its powers to declare, protect and regulate access to sites of national importance. Its mandate today extends well beyond excavation to conservation, epigraphy, underwater archaeology and the maintenance of site museums attached to many of the monuments it administers.