I was recently asked to contribute to a two-day meeting on Bronze Age civilisations, organised by the Research Centre for History and Culture, Beijing Normal University. Held on Zoom and with world coverage, it meant that some of us stayed up late and others arose early to contribute. Indeed, in my case I had to miss some presentations because I was falling asleep. Now the participants are preparing their papers to be published, having put together a series of issues to be concentrated on. It is almost a century since Gordon Childe published The Bronze Age, a volume that continues to exert a profound influence on our thoughts, even if increasingly as a source of inferences to take issue with. For example, he felt that Neolithic communities were self-sufficient, but when the knowledge of heating a brightly coloured rock to produce a liquid and then casting it into a mould arrived, all sorts of avenues opened. You had to have specialists with considerable skill to produce the metal and, often, to import ingots from afar to satisfy new social demands. New trade routes were opened, people and ideas as well as skills were increasingly on the move. And did all these necessarily generate the rise of social elites, who owned, organised, and disposed of bronze ornaments, tools, and weapons?
I have been interested in the Bronze Age of Southeast Asia since I first studied some finds from Non Nok Tha in North-east Thailand, followed by excavations at a site called Ban Chiang in 1974-1975. These resulted in publications that claimed the earliest evidence for bronze known, at about 3600 BC or even earlier. This really threw a cat among the pigeons, because it meant that bronzes were being cast much earlier than in China. It must be noted that copper and tin ores are abundant in Southeast Asia. It was all rather exciting, like an academic roller coaster. Experts came to Ban Chiang to see for themselves what was going on. Perhaps they were a bit disappointed, because bronzes were few: an axe, a few bangles, and a spearhead. Moreover, the Bronze Age graves could not be called wealthy, in terms of offerings.
In 1981, I was fortunately able to join with my Thai colleage Amphan Kijngam to excavate a site near Ban Chiang called Ban Na Di. We were in luck, finding not only quite a few burials, but also the furnaces used to raise copper and tin to melting point, the crucibles, and the moulds that had cast axes and bangles. Charcoal from the furnaces and hearths gave us a set of radiocarbon dates, while the pottery vessels found with the dead enabled us to correlate our sequence with that from Ban Chiang. There was a huge mismatch between the two chronologies, as ours was no earlier than 1000 BC. I knew that the dates from Non Nok Tha and Ban Chiang came from fragments of charcoal assembled from unreliable contexts, like disturbed grave-fill. Those claims for the earliest bronze in the world were really a lemon. Nevertheless, Ban Na Di turned up some memorable finds: superb clay cattle figurines, a child interred under a crocodile-skin shroud, a marble bangle thrice repaired with bronze tie-wires. Essentially, we found two groups of burials, one marginally richer than the other in terms of exotic ornaments, but certainly no evidence for the rise of a social elite that commanded access to or ownership of bronze ornaments or weaponry.
