The other day, a package turned up in my mail from the National Geographic Society. I opened it and out came a copy of their latest issue, in Thai. Slightly bemused, I did as I always do with their magazine and looked at the excellent photographs. I came across an article on the world’s most dramatic archaeological discoveries. On the first page, I found myself looking at three members of the terracotta army. Next, there was the golden mask of Tutankhamun, and then some monks at the Ta Prohm temple of Angkor. Intrigued by this high-flying list, I carried on to two men just recently uncovered at Pompeii, apparently the master and his slave according to reports. Then there was the prone corpse of the Ice Man undergoing an autopsy, surrounded by five doctors. Finally came a big surprise – and the reason why I had been sent this journal – for the next image was a photograph that I myself took in March 1985 of burial 15 at Khok Phanom Di.
A distant bell sounded in my memory: I must have been asked to supply this image to National Geographic, and then quite forgot about it. After all, burial 15 has been illustrated many times in different outlets. Then something struck me that led to a train of thought. All the images prior to burial 15 concerned men. The monks at Angkor, the terracotta soldiers, and all five doctors examining the ice man, were men. But burial 15 was a woman. What made her so remarkable?
She lived in a community that it has been my privilege to return from oblivion. Khok Phanom Di is a steep-sided mound that commands the flat floodplain of the Bang Pakong River. I first visited it in 1982. Two of my Thai colleagues and I drove for an hour or so east from Bangkok, and ascended the steep track to the monastery on the top. We met the abbott, who took us to a still-open square opened by a local school teacher. I climbed down a bamboo ladder, at least 8m or 9m, marveling at the stratigraphy, and promised myself that one day, when I had published my just-finished excavations at Ban Na Di, I would come back.
