Ban Chiang is a village site in northern Thailand excavated in 1974-1975 by Chet Gorman of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Pisit Charoenwongsa of the Thai Fine Arts Department. Before this work scholars thought that bronze metallurgy reached Thailand from India around 500 BCE; the general tone of the scholarship was that civilization in Thailand was entirely imported, and very late. These excavations showed that Thailand had its own, unique Bronze Age dating as far back as 2100 BCE.
The site was discovered by what can only be called blind luck:
Stephen Young was walking through the village of Ban Chiang in northeast Thailand in 1966 and tripped on a kapok tree root, fell headlong, and launched one of the major archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.
Finding himself on the ground, he noticed a ceramic ring protruding from the soil, which turned out to be the rim of a partially buried clay pot. He then noticed that he was in fact surrounded by these “circles” in the earth. The pots, slowly being exposed by erosion, were buff in color with striking designs in red. Young noticed that the sherds were not glazed, and so must have been very old. A lost ancient culture was being revealed.
Several sites of this culture have now been identified. They are all unfortified villages with little sign of hierarchy -- all the houses and burials are pretty much the same. At Ban Chiang, 142 burials were found, and none of them showed signs of trauma from warfare.
The most remarkable things about the culture are the pottery and the high quality bronze.
The project has
a great web site and they are putting tons of scholarly data online -- all the data on the skeletons from the cemetery, for example, and technical details on all the bronze objects. Kudos to the University of Pennsylvania for making all of this available to people who until tonight knew nothing at all about Thai archaeology.
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