My first experience of fieldwork in Southeast Asia found me in Roi et province of Northeast Thailand. It was a total accident that led me to this spot. The mighty Mekong River was then in the early stages of being seriously affected by the construction of hydro dams on its tributaries.
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…
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?
... 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.
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.
Professor Charles Higham will be a familiar figure to CWA readers. Not only does he write a regular column for the magazine, but he is also a world authority on the archaeology of Southeast Asia. When COVID shut down international…
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’.