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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 when we uncovered the skull of Burial 15 at Khok Phanom Di, it was blood red, as was the rest of this woman’s skeleton. However, this year has been a learning curve for me, because Sarah asked me to join her in authoring a paper on this site and several others I have been lucky enough to excavate. So, when she sent me a draft of the publication, I delved further into the prehistory of this substance.
It all began in Africa. An early interest in red ochre has been identified 300,000 years ago at Olorgesailie in Kenya. The Cave of Pigeons in Morocco was occupied at least 82,000 years ago, when the habitat was semi-arid and the group that lived there hunted horses and hares. Their shell beads came from the seashore at least 40km away. Did the owners of these shells travel to the beach, or were those precious shells exchanged between different social groups of hunter-gatherers? Whichever the case, the beads were special. They still have red ochre adhering to them, suggesting that, when worn, they rubbed against decorated clothing or skin. Blombos Cave lies 8,000km to the south, on the South African coast. There, between 100,000-70,000 years ago, anatomically modern hunters and gatherers took up residence and hunted the local ostriches, eland, and steenboks. Being so close to the seashore, they collected shellfish and also brought back a lot of tortoises to their base. They, too, wore shell-bead ornaments that appear to have been strung into necklaces, and they processed red ochre. One block of ochre at Blombos had been decorated with hatched lines.
Red ochre can be used to trace the migrations of modern humans out of Africa and into the lands occupied for millennia by their Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins. Qafzeh is a Levantine cave, where Homo sapiens graves have been dated to about 100,000 years ago. Again, we find evidence for the use of red ochre, incised patterns, and wearing ornaments crafted from marine shells. Toba Lake in northern Sumatra fills a crater formed during a volcanic eruption about 74,000 years ago. Ash spread from Africa to China, and the immediate impact on the climate, and on the people living in the wider region, was catastrophic. The question we face is whether or not the thick layer of Toba ashfall covers evidence for the presence of Homo sapiens. The answer is ‘yes’, for at Jwalapuram in central India stone tools that elsewhere were always associated with modern humans have been found under Toba ash, along with red ochre decorated with striations.
The initial human settlement of Laili Cave on Timor has been dated to 44,000 years ago, and at four other sites on this island the first modern humans wore marine-shell beads. Remarkably, these beads are stained red from repeated rubbing against an ochred surface, just as was seen in Morocco 50,000 years earlier. Madjedbebe in the far north of Australia was occupied at least 50,000 years ago and possibly even earlier. The first settlers brought with them stone tool making skills, grinding stones to process seeds, and they used red ochre. Indeed, the early artists of the region also employed this pigment.
Our ancestors followed a northern migratory route, too, across the open steppe landscape with its wide horizons and few caves, and so we find many settlements in the open. At Kara Bom, for example, occupied about 43,000 years ago, the settlers brought with them artefacts with links further west, including red ochre, a pebble decorated with painted stripes, and pierced bone pendants. Yana is the most remarkable of these sites, and excavations have uncovered a veritable mammoth graveyard, where mammoth bones have stone and ivory spear tips embedded in them, or bear the scars of spears. A remarkable feature of this site is the abundance of ivory ornaments, which include decorated plaques thought to have been worn on clothing, and beads painted with red ochre. It was from this region that the use of red ochre was introduced to the Clovis and Folsom people of North America.
A prized pigment
Obviously, our ancestors were attracted to ochre because of its blood-red colour, and it has several potential uses. The Himba women of Namibia habitually paint themselves and pigment their hair with red ochre, in order to beautify themselves and offer protection against the sun and insect pests. Red ochre has been used down the ages as a pigment for painting. However, its most consistent use in Southeast Asia has been as a component of rituals when burying the dead. We were able to examine graves from four sites spanning 2,500 years from the initial Neolithic occupation to the end of the Iron Age. At Neolithic Khok Phanom Di, occupied from 2300 BC, 82% of the skeletons were reddened with ochre; those without were virtually all newly born infants. Over 500 years, the inhabitants lived in or near an estuary covered in mangroves. Mosquitoes must have been a real problem there, for the Neolithic people had the thalassaemia gene, which provided resistance to malaria, but at the expense of suffering from anaemia. We also find that the richest graves in terms of mortuary offerings were those that contained the most red-ochred bones. It seems likely that they coloured their bodies red, and the ochre impregnated their bones after decomposition in the grave.
No ochre was found in any of the near-contemporary Neolithic graves at inland Ban Non Wat, where it was only in the Bronze Age, which followed on seamlessly from the Neolithic, that red ochre played a part in mortuary rituals. We found that at least half of the very wealthy in the second Bronze Age phase were accompanied by lumps of red ochre. In two female graves, pools of ochre were found beyond the head of one and by the feet of another. It is interesting that in several instances, the lumps of ochre had been positioned next to bivalve shells. The latter recur in many prehistoric graves across Southeast Asia and are widely interpreted as being symbolic of fertility and rebirth. This does suggest that the red ochre had the same symbolic purpose. The use of ochre in burials continued until the end of the Bronze Age, but not in such abundance as during the much wealthier earlier period.
With the initial Iron Age, the situation becomes really interesting. The cemetery contained well over 100 graves of men and women, infants and children. Pellets of red ochre, carefully shaped, were regularly placed with the dead. There are two distinct but contemporary groups of burials, one with the head facing north and the other to the south. When you plot where the pellets were placed, we find that the southern people unerringly chose the right-hand area, while the northern preference was the head and ankles. There was also a regular association between red ochre pellets, spindle whorls, and lumps of grey clay. Clay is widely used as a mordant in dyeing fabric, and the whorls were used to spin yarn. This was a community that included weavers, raising the question of whether the ochre was used as their dye.
Non Ban Jak was occupied during the late Iron Age, and just three of the 199 graves contained ochre. Clearly, it was falling away in relevance and one wonders why. There is a possible answer. This site was occupied as Buddhism was spreading into the region, with the opening of the Maritime Silk Road links with South Asia. We have found a clay figurine of the Buddha at Non Ban Jak, and a lion on a ceramic disc, the lion often representing the Buddha. It could be that, with the new religion, the old ways of using blood red ochre to assure the dead of rebirth was no longer foremost in the minds of those who lived in that town.
Whatever the cause, this has been a learning curve for me in pursuing what might have been in the minds of the communities that we have found so endlessly interesting.
Charles Higham is a Professor at Otago University in New Zealand, and an authority on Cambodia's Angkor civilisation and Ban Non Wat in Thailand.
All images: Charles Higham
