Ban Chiang
Ban Chiang is an archaeological site in Nong Han district, Udon Thani province, Thailand. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992. Discovered in 1966, the site first attracted interest due to its ancient red-painted pottery. Furthermore, Ban Chiang is a significant site known for its archaeological evidence of early agriculture and its strong influence of culture depicted through artwork specifically seen in the red-painted pottery. Ban Chiang’s long history of site history and metal craftsmanship shows the biological and cultural changes over time and their influences on the community. More recently, it gained international attention in 2008 when the United States Department of Justice, following an undercover investigation begun in 2003, raided several museums for their role in trafficking in Ban Chiang antiquities.
Discovery
Villagers had uncovered some of the pottery in prior years without insight into their age or historical importance. In August 1966, Steve Young, a political science student at Harvard College, was living in the village conducting interviews for his senior honors thesis. Young, a speaker of Thai, was familiar with the work of Wilhelm Solheim and his theory of the possible ancient origins of civilization in Southeast Asia. One day while walking down a path in Ban Chiang with his assistant, an art teacher at the village school, Young tripped over the root of a red kapok tree and fell on his face in the dirt path. Under him were the exposed tops of small and medium-sized pottery jars. Young recognized that the unglazed earthenware pots had been low-fired and were quite old, but that the designs applied to the surface of the vessels were unique. He took samples of pots to Princess Phanthip Chumbote at the private museum of Suan Pakkad Palace in Bangkok and to Chin Yu Di of the Thai Government's Fine Arts Department. Later, Elisabeth Lyons, an art historian on the staff of the Ford Foundation, sent potsherds from Ban Chiang to the University of Pennsylvania for dating. Unfortunately, the early publicity, the beauty of the pots, and the belief that the pots were several thousands of years old led to avid collecting and consequent avid looting by the villagers.Archaeology
The Fine Arts Department of Thailand conducted several small excavations during the 1960s and early 1970s. These excavations revealed skeletons, bronze artifacts and a wealth of pots. Rice fragments were also found, leading to the belief that the Bronze Age settlers were probably farmers. The site's oldest graves do not include bronze artifacts and are therefore from a Neolithic culture; the most recent graves date to the Iron Age.The 1974-1975 excavations
The first intensive excavation of Ban Chiang was a joint effort by the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Thai Department of Fine Arts, with co-directors Chester Gorman and Pisit Charoenwongsa. The aim was not only to investigate the site but to train Thai and western archaeologists in the latest techniques. Because of the looting, they had difficulty finding undisturbed areas to excavate, but settled on two areas 100 meters apart. The locales proved to be far richer in finds than expected, and the distinctive red-on-buff pottery that had excited so much interest proved to be quite late, with many levels of equally noteworthy pottery and other cultural remains beneath them. More exciting, the excavations uncovered crucibles and other evidence of metal working, showing that the villagers of Ban Chiang from an early stage manufactured their own metal artifacts rather than simply importing them from elsewhere. Recovered bronze objects include bracelets, rings, anklets, wires and rods, spearheads, axes and adzes, hooks, blades, and little bells. After the two seasons of excavation, six tons of pottery, stone, and metal artifacts were shipped to the University of Pennsylvania Museum for analysis. The early death of Chet Gorman in 1981, at the age of 43, slowed the process of analysis and publication.This site has often been called a "cemetery site", but research has suggested that the deceased were buried next to or beneath dwellings. This practice is called residential burial.
Lifestyle as revealed by human remains
At least 142 discrete burials were found in the 1974-1975 excavations. Analysis of the human remains by Michael Pietrusewsky and Michele Toomay Douglas revealed that the people lived a vigorous and active lifestyle with little evidence of interpersonal violence or any form of warfare. The subsistence was based on mixed agricultural/hunting/gathering economy, co-occurring with metallurgy. The conclusion that the centuries-long occupation of the site was largely peaceful is bolstered by the lack of metal weapons.Dating the artifacts
The excavation at Ban Chiang in 1974–1975 was followed by an article by Chester Gorman and Pisit Charoenwongsa, claiming evidence for the earliest dates in the world for bronze casting and iron working. Subsequent excavations, including that at Ban Non Wat, have now shown that the proposed early dates for Ban Chiang are unlikely. The first datings of the artifacts used the thermoluminescence technique, resulting in a range from 4420–3400 BCE, which would have made the site the earliest Bronze Age culture in the world. These dates stirred world-wide interest. Thermoluminescence dating of pottery was at the time an experimental technique and had been applied to Ban Chiang sherds of uncertain provenance. However, with the 1974–1975 excavation, sufficient material became available for radiocarbon dating. Reanalysis by radiocarbon dating suggested that a more likely date for the earliest metallurgy at Ban Chiang was c. 2000–1700 BCE. A date of 2100 BCE was obtained from rice phytoliths taken from inside a grave vessel of the lowest grave, which had no metal remains. The youngest grave was about 200 CE. Bronze making began circa 2000 BCE, as evidenced by crucibles and bronze fragments. A contrasting analysis was conducted by Charles Higham of the University of Otago using the bones from the people who lived at Ban Chiang and the bones of animals interred with them. The resulting determinations were analyzed using Bayesian statistics and the results suggested that the initial settlement of Ban Chiang took place about 1500 BCE, with the transition to the Bronze Age about 1000 BCE. The chronology of Ban Chiang metallurgy is still in considerable dispute.Metallurgy
Ban Chiang, along with other surrounding villages in northeast Thailand, contains many bronze artifacts that demonstrate that metallurgy had been practiced in small, village settings nearly four thousand years ago. Bronze artifacts represent culture, art, and diversity and allows researchers to better interpret early ways of life.This is of interest to archaeologists, as ancient Southeast Asian metallurgy flourished without the presence of a militaristic or urbanized state, unlike many other ancient societies that had mastered metallurgy.Dr Joyce White and Elizabeth Hamilton co-authored a four-volume Ban Chiang metals monograph, the most extensive of its kind in Ban Chiang scholarship. The work presents metals and related evidence from the site as well as three other sites in northeast Thailand: Ban Tong, Ban Phak Top, and Don Klang. It is the second installment in the Thai Archaeology Monograph Series, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and distributed for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
In the monograph, White and Hamilton catalogue and classify metal artifacts as well as contribute to the Ban Chiang chronology discourse. They analyzed the metals comprehensively through innovative technological perspectives in order to understand ancient metals in their social contexts. To do this, they make systematic assessments by typological range, variation in metal composition and manufacturing techniques, evidence for on-site production activities, and contextual evidence for deposition of metal finds. White and Hamilton also write that regional variation in metalworker know-how and choices can reveal past networks of communities of metallurgical practice that could have important ramifications for economic and social networks of the time as well as how those changed over time. One of their major findings is that most copper alloy products were cast in local villages and not at large centralized workshops.
White, a leading scholar on Ban Chiang, directs an organization, the Institute of Southeast Asian Archaeology, that manages the Ban Chiang Project at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The project runs an open access that presents the data on metal and metal-related artifacts found at Ban Chiang and surrounding sites. The metal artifacts are classified into nine groups: bangles, adzes/tillers, blades, points, bells, wires/rods, flat, amorphous, and miscellaneous. The three metal-related groups are crucibles, molds, and slag. The metals database also records the time period in which the artifacts were created and the technical analyses performed on each artifact.
Significant bovidae zooarchaeological work
A faunal remain analysis done by Amphan Kijngam and Charles Higham allows for a deeper understanding of Ban Chiang’s chronological and cultural sequences. Previous research on Ban Chiang and the use of radiocarbon determinations dated the site’s initial settlement to the midfourth millennium BC, but through the work of dating human remains found, the original settlement has been dated to ca 1500 BC which in turns affects the faunal remain analysis of agriculture adaptation and environmental reconstruction. Over the course of several excavations in 1975, remains of multiple species in the bovidae family have been identified and analyzed in order to determine if domesticated cattle were introduced to Ban Chiang as was rice cultivation, or if Thai cattle use was previously present prior to rice cultivation. The remains excavated, to be considered for analysis, must have been sexually dimorphic, dense, and able to be distinguishable between bovidae species. The size and ascription of bones was used to differentiate domestic vs wild.Through these excavations, researchers found elements from two species of wild bovidae B. gaurus and B. javanicus. Interestingly, phalanges similar in size to modern domestic samples were discovered but three of them were more closely related to a male gaur resulting in a strong hypothesis of hunting happening at Ban Chiang. A further analysis of dental wear and eruption showed patterns of being worn down and few were deciduous, little to no long bones with unfused epiphyses were found, and large butcher marks were found. Furthermore, an analysis of the second fore phalanges matched the modern domestic breed of Bubalus arnee, so it is unlikely that this breed was hunted and was actually a domesticated breed. MtDNA variation and Y-chromosomal sequences show that this breed was domesticated by 2000 BC in Southern China and Southeast Asia.
B. taurus is a common bovidae found at Ban Chiang. Similar species inherited mtDNA from B. taurus. This led zooarchaeologists to believe that B. taurus was domesticated in early Thai settlements and were descendents of the same populations. This provides insight to the spread of taurus through its introduction in China where it was then brought into northeastern and central parts of Thailand due to agriculture expansion, from early Neolithic farmers. This data is used to examine the time period of rice adaptation in northern Thailand of about 1050 BC to AD 400 which marked a significant change in early societies from hunter gatherers to farming and agriculture. Although often overlooked, faunal remains are a crucial part of archaeology in order to better understand early human evolution.