Seeing red

The beads are stained red from rubbing against an ochred surface, just as was seen in Morocco 50,000 years earlier. A few years ago, Sarah Paris – then a graduate student at Cambridge University – asked if she could access the human skeletons from Khok Phanom Di in order to study the mortuary use of red ochre. I excavated this great Neolithic site in 1985, and I willingly agreed. Last year, she completed her doctoral dissertation and at the last Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, she won the prize for the best presentation by a graduate student. I must admit that red ochre was never a topic that attracted my attention, although I well remember that w