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In praise of volunteers
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.
Back in 1984, I was planning to excavate a site that I knew would be very deep and demanding, and I was well aware that it would take a long time, and need a lot of commitment and money. It is known as Khok Phanom Di – literally meaning, in a mixture of Thai and Khmer, ‘mound mound good’. I had visited the site in 1981, after completing a season at the Bronze and Iron Age site of Ban Na Di (‘village good rice field’) in North-east Thailand. My colleagues Amphan and Somsuda from the Fine Arts Department and I drove out from Bangkok to the east, and, after an hour or so, we turned left off the main road from Chachoengsao to Phanat Nikhom, heading for a mound that stood out on the fla
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