Ban Chiang

Discovery

Villagers had uncovered some of the pottery in prior years without insight into its age or historical importance. In August 1966 Steve Young, an anthropology and government student at Harvard College, was living in the village conducting interviews for his senior honors thesis. Young, a speaker of Thai, was familiar with the work of Wilhelm G. Solheim and his theory of possible ancient origins of civilization in Southeast Asia. One day while walking down a path in Ban Chiang with his assistant, an art teacher in the village school, Young tripped over a root of a kapok tree and fell on his face in the dirt path. Under him were the exposed tops of pottery jars of small and medium sizes. Young recognized that the firing techniques used to make the pots were very rudimentary, but that the designs applied to the surface of the vessels were unique and wonderful. He took samples of pots to Princess Phanthip Chumbote who had the private museum of Suan Pakkad in Bangkok and to Chin Yu Di of the Thai Government's Fine Arts Department Later, Elisabeth Lyons, an art historian on the staff of the Ford Foundation, sent sherds from Ban Chiang to the University of Pennsylvania for dating.

Archaeology

During the first formal scientific excavation in 1967, several skeletons, together with bronze grave gifts, were unearthed. Rice fragments have also been found, leading to the belief that the Bronze Age settlers were probably farmers. The site's oldest graves do not include bronze artifacts and are therefore from a Neolithic culture; the most recent graves date to the Iron Age. Pots and sherds from the site are now found in museums across the world, including the Museum für Indische Kunst in Berlin and the British Museum in London.

This site has often been called "the cemetery site," but recent research has suggested that the deceased were actually buried next to or beneath dwellings. This practice is called residential burial.

Dating the artifacts

The first datings of the artifacts using the thermoluminescence technique resulted in a range from 4420 BCE to 3400 BCE, which would have made the site the earliest Bronze Age culture in the world. However, with the 1974–1975 excavation, sufficient material became available for radiocarbon dating, which resulted in more recent dates. The earliest grave was about 2100 BCE, the latest about 200 CE. Bronze making began circa 2000 BCE, as evidenced by crucibles and bronze fragments. Bronze objects include bracelets, rings, anklets, wires and rods, spearheads, axes and adzes, hooks, blades, and little bells.

A date of 2100 BCE was obtained from rice phytoliths from inside a grave vessel of the lowest grave. A dating program for this site has involved dating the bones from the people who lived at Ban Chiang and the bones of animals interred with them. The resulting determinations have been analysed using the Bayesian statistic OxCal 4.0, and the results suggested that the initial settlement of Ban Chiang took place by about 1500 BCE, with the transition to the Bronze Age about 1000 BCE.

Museum and World Heritage Status

The Ban Chiang museum is located by the protected excavation site and provides general information for the public about the site and its importance for human history. Staff there act both to inform visiting members of the public about the site, as well as the monitoring of the condition of the site and providing resources for academics.

The site itself was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1992 under criteria iii, which describes a site that "bear[s] a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or has disappeared."

Included in the museum's collection is the traveling exhibit curated by Dr. Joyce White, titled Ban Chiang, Discovery of a Lost Bronze Age, which toured the U.S. and international sites following Penn Museum excavations and became part of the Ban Chiang Museum permanent exhibit in 1987. The museum also includes "displays and information that highlights the three main periods and six sub-periods" as well as the site's general and excavation history. The site and museum have been well-reviewed by several travel publications, including CNN, TripAdvisor, and the official tourism site of Thailand.

US legal case

The site made headlines in January 2008 when thousands of artifacts from the Ban Chiang cultural tradition and other prehistoric traditions of Thailand were found to be illegally in several California museums and other locations. The plot involved smuggling the items out of Thailand into the US and then donating them to museums in order to claim large tax write-offs. There were said to be more items in museums than at the site itself. This was brought to light during high profile raids conducted by the police after a National Park Service agent had posed as a private collector. Some of the cases have been resolved and some of the museums have returned artifacts to Thailand.