... you can peer down into a deep square where Bronze Age burials are left in the ground following an earlier Thai excavation. Your eyes alight on the grave of a man accompanied by a remarkable number of pottery vessels and a socketed copper-base axe.…
When COVID-19 reached New Zealand, all my plans to continue excavating and attend conferences ground to a halt. So I turned my attention to writing my memoir, Digging Deep: a journey into South-east Asia’s past. Having kept a diary since 1955, I was able to pinpoint to the day various…
In 1950, Peter Williams-Hunt published a paper in Antiquity entitled ‘Irregular earthworks in eastern Siam: a review’. A former RAF pilot, he had pored over wartime aerial photos taken of the extensive Khorat Plateau in North-east Thailand. He was intrigued by the numerous enigmatic prehistoric sites, at first sight reminiscent…
I doubted if Daeng would find anything of interest within. An hour later, she was revealing the smallest skeleton I have ever seen.…
Myanmar is a newcomer to the study of South-east Asian prehistory. Twenty years ago, I joined a group of colleagues to visit, at the invitation of the Myanmar government, the first Bronze Age site to be discovered there.…
An infant who died at birth during the fourth Bronze Age phase was interred with a hen’s egg over the left hand; perhaps the infant was holding it when placed in the grave. What better symbol can be found for the regeneration of life itself than an egg?…
Down we probed into each and, before long, another surprise. Each contained a human skeleton, ranging from an adult woman to a child and, finally, a new-born infant. They were burying the dead under the floorboards!…
It portrays a ferocious Maya chief clad in a jaguar skin, with a jaguar’s head on his own, spearing an unfortunate captive. First seen by an outsider in 1946, the paintings are as close a reflection as you are likely to see of life in an elite Maya centre.…
The Princess was not buried alone. Alongside her was a grave big enough for an adult, which contained the ochre covered skeleton of a little girl aged about 18 months, covered in about 15,000 shell beads and, lo and behold, a tiny clay anvil for shaping pots.…
The civil war had been very disruptive. There had been looting, pillage, and social upheaval. There are records of a most heinous crime, rooting up the boundary markers of land ownership, for which those guilty were impaled.…
We all gathered round on another day, when a whoop of excitement emerged from the next-door shop, where Professor Frend was working in a cellar. He had just found the lovely bronze statuette of Venus, now a proud exhibit in the Verulamium Museum…
The contents of those two pits amaze. They include some of the most remarkable bronzes from the ancient world: human face-masks with protruding eyes, thought to depict Cancong, the mythical first king of Shu.…
Originating in the remote past on the island of Taiwan, these Austronesian-speaking people were ultimately to settle from Malagasy to Rapa Nui, Easter Island. But did they go even further, and reach the Americas before Columbus?…
For some unaccountable reason, perhaps a case of mistaken identity, Polly and I were ushered into a private room to sit down to afternoon tea with the junta.…
One of the most breathtaking experiences in my archaeological life was to mount the steps and look out over the assembled ranks of the terracotta army.…
My excavations, including Khok Phanom Di, have yielded well over 1,000 human graves, and often the dead were interred with multiple mortuary offerings from fine pottery vessels to thousands of ornaments in gold, silver, bronze, iron, carnelian, glass, shell, and agate.…
There is no email I await with greater anticipation and, indeed, trepidation, than one captioned ‘Your radiocarbon results’.…
Charles Higham looks at how a routine DNA analysis resulted in a stunning discovery about the prehistory of our human past…