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 flat plain like a stranded whale. We drove up on to the top and parked next to the Buddhist temple there. A small excavation square put in by a local schoolteacher remained open, and a bamboo ladder was still in place. I climbed down into inky depths for at least 9m, marvelling at the clarity of the stratigraphy. A human skull with vacant eye sockets looked back at me from the section. On the spot, I promised myself that one day I would return and take on this challenge.
Just as an army marches on its stomach, so a dig marches on money. In 1983, while pondering the Khok Phanom Di challenge, I received a totally unexpected letter. It came from someone I had never heard of called Brian Rosborough, postmarked ‘Boston, MA’, under the letterhead ‘Earthwatch’. It began with a simple question: ‘Would you like a research grant?’ My initial reaction was, ask a silly question and you will get a silly answer. Then I read on and learned how Earthwatch operated. If my proposed fieldwork were approved, they would endeavour to assemble a team of volunteers to join me in the field. Each would contribute money to pay for their accommodation and local transport, and their own airfare to Bangkok, but there would be a margin in their payment to defray the cost of the dig. Put simply, volunteers would pay me for the chance to work on my excavation. I would receive half of their contribution, the other half going to Earthwatch to cover their administrative costs; Uncle Sam came to the party as well, for the volunteer contribution was deemed a charitable taxable expense.
I needed money, so I applied. This began a relationship that lasted for 21 years, involving eight excavation programmes and more than 300 volunteers in teams to a maximum of 15, so I would like to write in praise of volunteers. It is how I began: at Snail Down in Wiltshire in 1955. I found that digging is incredible fun and, as my friend Kent Flannery once said, ‘digging is the most exciting thing you can do with your trousers on’. It is, of course, vital that your excavation yields finds that are tangible and meaningful, because if you simply find yourself chopping dirt, it can be terminally tedious.
Rehabilitating the Neanderthals