Ban Chiang culture

Ban Chiang is an archaeological site in Nong Han district, Udon Thani province, northeast Thailand, and its name is used for the prehistoric community that lived there. Villagers had dug up some of its pottery in earlier years without knowing its age. In August 1966 Steve Young, a Harvard College student who spoke Thai and was living in the village to research his thesis, tripped over the root of a red kapok tree and fell onto the exposed tops of buried jars. He saw that the low-fired pots were old and their designs unique, and took samples to Princess Phanthip Chumbote at the Suan Pakkad Palace museum in Bangkok and to the Fine Arts Department; the art historian Elisabeth Lyons later sent sherds to the University of Pennsylvania for dating. Publicity and the beauty of the pots led to avid collecting and looting.

The Fine Arts Department made several small excavations in the 1960s and early 1970s, finding skeletons, bronze objects, many pots and fragments of rice. The first intensive excavation, in 1974–1975, was a joint project of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Fine Arts Department, directed by Chester Gorman and Pisit Charoenwongsa. The site’s oldest graves hold no bronze and belong to a Neolithic culture, while the latest date to the Iron Age.

The dating is still disputed. Thermoluminescence dates first gave 4420–3400 BCE, which would have made Ban Chiang the earliest Bronze Age culture in the world. Radiocarbon dating then suggested the first metalworking c. 2000–1700 BCE, with rice phytoliths from the lowest grave dated to 2100 BCE. Charles Higham’s Bayesian analysis of human and animal bones instead put first settlement around 1500 BCE and the start of the Bronze Age around 1000 BCE.

The 1974–1975 excavations found at least 142 separate burials. The site has often been called a cemetery, but research suggests that the dead were buried next to or beneath houses, a practice called residential burial. Analysis of the skeletons by Michael Pietrusewsky and Michele Toomay Douglas showed that people led vigorous, active lives with little evidence of violence between individuals or of warfare, and the scarcity of metal weapons supports the view that the long occupation was largely peaceful.

The villagers lived by a mixed economy of farming, hunting and gathering, alongside metalworking. Rice was grown, and a study of animal bones by Amphan Kijngam and Charles Higham shows both hunting and herding. Bones of two wild cattle, the gaur and B. javanicus, together with heavy butchery marks, point to hunting, while the water buffalo was a domesticated breed. Domestic cattle (B. taurus) were also common; they are thought to have reached northeast and central Thailand from China with the spread of farming by early Neolithic farmers.

Farming had costs as well as gains. The use of water buffalo in wet rice fields during the Early period (2100–900 BCE) is linked with new diseases caught through close contact with domesticated animals: life expectancy was 30.4 years among people buried before buffalo farming and 28.1 years after it. The same changes also brought an increase in goods and a richer culture.

What is known of belief at Ban Chiang comes from its burials, and any reading of them is inference. The dead were buried beside or beneath the houses of the living rather than in a separate cemetery.

Graves held pottery vessels: one in the lowest grave contained rice, whose phytoliths gave one of the site’s oldest dates. Bones of animals were buried with the people. The oldest graves held no bronze and later ones did, which is how archaeologists tell the Neolithic burials from those of the metal ages.

The red-painted pottery is the clearest expression of the community’s culture in art, and its designs were unlike any known when they were found. Their meaning, like the purpose of the goods placed with the dead, is not recorded.

Ban Chiang first drew attention for its pottery: unglazed, low-fired earthenware with red-painted designs. The distinctive red-on-buff ware proved to be late, c. 300 BCE – 200 CE, and beneath it lay many levels of equally notable pottery and other remains.

Its metalwork matters most to archaeologists. The 1974–1975 excavations found crucibles and other signs of metalworking, which show that the villagers made their own metal objects from an early stage rather than only importing them. Bronze finds include bracelets, rings, anklets, wires and rods, spearheads, axes and adzes, hooks, blades and small bells. Metallurgy of this kind flourished in small villages in Southeast Asia without a militaristic or urbanised state, unlike many other ancient societies that mastered metalworking.

Joyce White and Elizabeth Hamilton’s four-volume monograph on the metals of Ban Chiang and three nearby sites, Ban Tong, Ban Phak Top and Don Klang, completed in 2021, studies the objects by type, alloy, manufacture, evidence of production on site and where they were found. One of its main findings is that most copper-alloy objects were cast in local villages, not in large central workshops. The Ban Chiang Project’s open-access database sorts the metal finds into nine groups, from bangles and adzes to bells, and the related finds into crucibles, moulds and slag.

Ban Chiang belonged to a wider world of village metalworkers in northeast Thailand. Joyce White and Elizabeth Hamilton argue that regional differences in metalworkers’ know-how and choices can reveal networks of communities sharing metallurgical practice, which may have mattered for the economic and social networks of the time and how they changed.

Its animals tell a story of movement. Domestic cattle (B. taurus) are thought to have been introduced to China and then brought into northeast and central Thailand as farming spread. Genetic studies show that the water buffalo kept at Ban Chiang had been domesticated by 2000 BCE in southern China and Southeast Asia. In northern Thailand, the adoption of rice farming, placed by one study between about 1050 BCE and 400 CE, marked a change from hunting and gathering to farming.

Ban Chiang’s place in the wider Bronze Age is still argued over. Gorman and Charoenwongsa first claimed evidence for the world’s earliest bronze casting and iron working there, but later excavations, including that at Ban Non Wat, have made those early dates unlikely, and the chronology of Ban Chiang’s metallurgy remains in considerable dispute.

Ban Chiang was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992 under criterion iii, as exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or civilisation. The Ban Chiang National Museum presents the site, its discovery and its interpretation, with an open excavation pit at the temple of Wat Pho Si Mai, some 700 metres away, showing artefacts and replica skeletons as they were found. The travelling exhibition Ban Chiang, Discovery of a Lost Bronze Age, curated by Joyce White, joined the museum’s permanent display in 1987. Tourism has brought shops and restaurants to the village.

The site’s fame also fed looting. In January 2008 US federal agents carried out 13 raids on museums, shops, warehouses and homes in California and Chicago, ending a five-year undercover investigation, Operation Antiquity, in which a National Park Service agent posed as a collector. More than 10,000 looted artefacts were seized, many from Ban Chiang, and at least five California museums held such objects; there were said to be more of them in US museums than at the site itself. Joyce White examined the finds and served as an expert witness.

The alleged chief smuggler died in 2017 before trial, but the owners of the Silk Road Gallery, Jonathan and Cari Markell, pleaded guilty in 2015. The Mingei International Museum returned 68 artefacts to Thailand and the Bowers Museum 542. The case set a higher standard of accountability for museums dealing with cultural property.