Excavating Southeast Asia’s prehistory in the Cold War: American archaeology in neocolonial Thailand

Introduction

The inclusion of Thailand’s prehistoric site of Ban Chiang on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization World Heritage List in 1992 failed to replicate the national jubilation caused by the inscription, one year earlier, of Sukhothai and Ayutthaya, commonly regarded as the kingdom’s former capitals. In fact, the inscription of Ban Chiang was more unexpected, for knowledge of it was still relatively recent in the early 1990s; Neolithic potshards were first recovered there in the 1950s, yet attracted little interest until 1966, when they were brought to the attention of local pundits by an American student. In March 1972, Thailand’s royal couple called on Ban Chiang during a two-day visit to the northeastern province of Udon Thani. After being briefed by officers of the Fine Arts Department (FAD), King Bhumibol (r. 1946—present) stated: “It appears to me that this kind of discovery and information would be important to people all over the world and not merely to the people of Thailand. Many institutions may be interested in these materials, and be willing to aid in obtaining chronological dating … If the local people understand the significance of our task we may anticipate greater cooperation and further support from other sources” (Charoengwongsa, 1982: 13–14). King Bhumibol’s plea was not in vain; in 1974–1975 FAD and the Museum at the University of Pennsylvania undertook two joint excavation seasons at Ban Chiang.

Another kind of cooperation had been underway over the previous decade in northeast Thailand, or Isan, the kingdom’s poorest region. From 1964 to 1975, Udon Thani’s eponymous provincial capital hosted an airbase that was the frontline facility of the US 13th Air Force. From there, B-52s took off on bombing missions to North Vietnam and Laos. Udon Thani also housed the headquarters of Air America, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-operated facade civilian airline that carried out shadow military operations in Laos, where the communist Pathet Lao was seeking to overthrow the US-supported royal government. Udon Thani’s strategic significance was underscored by the presence in town of a US consulate. The adjacent Sakhon Nakhon province, bordering with Laos, was instead the epicenter of the communist insurgency. There the clandestine Communist Party of Thailand first engaged in combat with government troops in August 1965, four years before the launch of its Maoist-styled People’s Liberation Army.

The FAD–University Museum excavations marked the culmination of a decade of sustained research activity by American archaeologists whose findings led to the hypothesis that the Khorat Plateau was a metallurgical region older than China’s and the Indus Valley’s. In addition to challenging accepted wisdom on the origins of metallurgy in Asia, this hypothesis contradicted French colonial archaeology’s diffusionist model according to which Southeast Asia’s early cultural development was owed to imports from its more advanced neighbors—India and China. As an archaeologist commented at the time, “Archaeology in Southeast Asia has in recent years developed into a battlefield where an ever-expanding inventory of revolutionizing data, allied with an evermore precise technical apparatus, forces our conventional conceptual system into a last-stand retreat” (Kaneko, 1970: 3). Read in the context of the Vietnam War, which in 1968–1969 recorded the peak of US troops’ deployment and casualties (Karnow, 1997: 477), such warlike metaphors provide unwitting indication of the contiguity of military and archaeological undertakings in Southeast Asia at the turn of the 1970s.

By 1975, the year of communist takeovers in the region and of the US military withdrawal, a branch of the National Museum was under construction in Ban Chiang. In reporting on the excavations the following year, the mission’s codirectors challenged the commonplace notion that Southeast Asia’s prehistoric settlers had lacked creative genius by triumphantly announcing that their discoveries may cause a revision of the Bronze Age’s world chronology. Also, contrasting the newfound interest in prehistory to colonial archaeology’s predominant concern for historic conservation, they opined: “The swift rise of interest in archaeology by local Southeast Asian peoples is most certainly bound up with the nationalism of recently independent nations and their determination to organize their own excavations and perhaps, quite literally, to dig up their own identities” (Gorman and Charoengwongsa, 1976: 15).

Such an enthusiastic view of archaeology’s contribution to nation-building, though expressing sincere hopes of postcolonial self-empowerment, cannot but sound problematic today. In the three decades since Fowler’s (1987) j’accuse, much has been written on the political uses and abuses of archaeology (e.g., Diaz-Andreu and Champion, 1996; Kane, 2003; Kohl and Fawcett, 1996; Meskell, 1998; Silberman, 1989).

The archaeological services established in the early 1900s in British Burma, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies initiated historic conservation, established a preliminary dating of ancient monuments, and trained the first generation of indigenous archaeologists (Edwards, 2007; Glover, 2003). In this as in other matters, sovereign Thailand, known as Siam until 1939, adapted colonial practice to domestic needs by employing archaeology as ancillary to epigraphy to establish a chronology of the Thai kingdoms founded since the thirteenth century. Owing to political continuity in the postwar era, the documentary value of epigraphic and archaeological evidence supporting the Thai-centric view of the kingdom’s history was reinforced in contrast to the questioning of colonial knowledge elsewhere.

This article qualifies said scholarship by examining archaeological pursuits in the context of the neocolonial relation that bounded Thailand to the US from the end of the Second World War through to the end of the Vietnam War. The results of excavations conducted in Thailand’s militarized Northeast led American archaeologists to propose a revisionist model of Southeast Asia’s prehistory that granted indigenous people a cultural agency previously denied, but bore a double paradox: it was itself a by-product of US imperialism that was being advanced in the region by military intervention; and destabilized the nationalist historical narrative pivoted on the Thais’ preeminence.

The first part of the article reviews the discovery and study of Thailand’s prehistoric sites in relation to the Cold War politics of knowledge; next, it discusses the theory of an autonomous Southeast Asian Bronze Age as organic to the US political objective in the region, and finally it considers the domestic reception of the Ban Chiang tradition in the Cold War’s aftermath. By applying close reading to both popular accounts and expert analyses of the Ban Chiang excavations, this article also advances also a methodological approach regarding the use of archaeological narratives as sources for the historian.

Thailand as an object of Cold War knowledge

An examination of the politics of knowledge about Thailand must start by reviewing its status in the age of empire. Despite nationalist claims to the contrary, Thailand was subject in the period 1855–1945 to “semi-colonial” economic, diplomatic, and jurisdictional limitations imposed by Britain and France. After the war, the United States established a “special relationship” with Thailand by wresting it away from British influence and making it the bulwark against Indochinese communist movements in line with President Truman’s doctrine of the containment of communism (Fineman, 1997). So, while all the other Southeast Asian nations (bar the Philippines under US patronage) underwent decolonization and then animated the Non-Aligned camp, which made its debut in 1955 at the Bandung Conference (Indonesia), Thailand forged a neocolonial relation of dependence on the United States by assuming the role of the “Free World’s” bastion in the region. The financial benefits of this alliance were huge. Besides US$ 650 million of economic aid, Thailand received between 1950 and 1975 an additional US$ 940 million for defense and security plus $760 million for the operating cost and military equipment of the Thai troops serving in Vietnam from 1967 (some 13,000 men). In addition, US$ 250 million was invested in the construction of airbases in Thailand, and $850 million was pumped into the economy by US servicemen on Rest and Recreation leave from Vietnam (Kislenko, 2004).

During the 1950s and the 1960s, the United States financed the construction of major logistical infrastructures, starting with the Friendship Highway (the main communication artery between Bangkok and Isan), to serve the network of military bases in Northeast Thailand. Another aspect of this Cold War alliance was the massive American financing and training of Thai police and military forces to fight insurgents. The largest single project carried out by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was to assist the government in improving rural security. The primary recipients of American aid were the Provincial Police and the Border Patrol Police, the latter set up in the early 1950s with CIA assistance (Randolph, 1986: 88–89, 98–99). The alliance with Washington tightened at the turn of the 1960s under the autocratic regime of Cold War warrior, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat. As Thailand was assigned a central role in the US air-war strategy, Nakhon Ratchasima, the main northeastern city, became base in 1964 to the seventh US Logistic Battalion; in the same year, air bases were also activated in Nakhon Phanom and Udon Thani, in the upper Northeast (Randolph, 1986: 50–53).

Prior to the boundary demarcation negotiated with France in the 1890s, the Khorat Plateau was a prevalently ethnic Lao region under the successive authority of the kingdoms of Lan Xang and Vientiane (a suzerain of Siam since 1828). The imposition of Bangkok’s control over the Plateau’s western portion, Isan, alongside the attempt at culturally assimilating its Lao population to the Central Thais, caused popular unrest as early as 1902, when a millenarian rebellion broke out (Murdoch, 1971). During Sarit’s premiership, Isan’s economic underdevelopment was construed as a political “problem” (panha isan), for popular discontent might lead to support for the communist insurgency. A Northeast Development Plan was thus included as a separate chapter in Thailand’s first five-year national economic plan, drawn up in 1962 on the World Bank’s recommendation (Keyes, 2014: 102–108).

Washington’s strategy to contain communism’s domino effect in Southeast Asia necessitated the gathering of information. Because of Thailand’s indirect colonization in the age of empire, the kingdom never became an object of colonial knowledge in the way British India and French Indochina did. The production during the Cold War of what is to all effects a body of neocolonial knowledge about Thailand was the work of the research centers and area studies programs set up in American universities in the postwar period to train future government functionaries and diplomats (Chomsky, Zinn, Nader et al., 1997; Robin, 2001). Unsurprisingly, American scholarship on Thailand was informed by modernization theory, “the most explicit and systematic blueprint ever created by Americans for reshaping foreign societies” (Gilman, 2003: 5). This scholarship can be considered neocolonial on two counts: it foisted on the new generation of Thai technocrats, trained in American universities thanks to USAID and Fulbright Program scholarships, a hegemonic discourse about Thailand’s political, socioeconomic, and cultural constitution; and concurrently informed aid and counterinsurgency programs. Analytical constructs such as “bureaucratic polity” (Riggs, 1966), “loosely structured society” (Evers, 1969), and “modernization without development” (Jacobs, 1971) discursively produced the socioeconomic obstacles Thailand faced in becoming a “modern state”—that is to say, “democratic and equalitarian, scientific, economically advanced and sovereign,” in the words of a 1959 speech by sociologist Edward Shils (cited in Gilman, 2003: 1).

Beginning in the mid-1960s, several American social scientists began pursuing research projects in Thailand directly designed to counter communism. From 1961 to 1972, the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ran a field office in Bangkok the operations of which were by 1966 geared principally to assist the Thai government and the US mission in suppressing insurgency in Isan. ARPA enlisted several anthropologists to assist in the creation of nonpolice village defense forces. The investigation of their activities by the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association in the early 1970s caused the notorious “Thailand Controversy” (Wakin, 1992: 2–4, 80–86).

While there is no indication of the involvement of American archaeologists in counterinsurgency activities in Thailand, an analogy can be suggested, for Processual theory—the “New Archaeology”—that emerged in the United States at the turn of the 1960s was conceptualized as anthropology’s twin discipline (Binford, 1962; Willey and Phillips, 1958). According to Trigger (2006: 407), the New Archaeology shared with the positivist social sciences the aim “to produce objective, ethically neutral generalizations that were useful for the management of modern societies.” By the turn of the 1970s, Processual theory was the dominant position in American prehistoric archaeology (Smith, 2004: 39). Yet the implications of its application to the study of prehistoric archaeology in countries under American hegemony remain to be examined.

Siam's Archaeological Service, instituted in 1924, followed the model of French colonial archaeology by focusing on the inventory and conservation of monumental remains while relying largely on epigraphic evidence to corroborate the relative chronology of historic monuments drawn from stylistic features. The surveying of the historical landscape prior to the Pacific War partook of the wider project of producing knowledge about, as much as in the service of, the “Thai nation” (chat thai), as the ethnically plural kingdom of Siam came to be characterized in official discourse since the 1910s. Though epistemologically and methodologically grounded in Western knowledge, epigraphy and archaeology in early twentieth-century Siam served thus the nationalist ideology that lionized the Thais as being politically and culturally dominant over the kingdom’s minority ethnicities (Peleggi, 2013). The next section considers in more detail this formulation and its initial revision.

The changing image of Southeast Asia’s prehistory

Cultural diplomacy—from traveling art exhibitions to musicians’ international tours—was a significant aspect of the overall strategy of “cultural warfare” Washington deployed to win hearts and minds in the protracted ideological struggle that was the Cold War in the West (Saunders, 1999). In the early 1960s, Thailand’s government too embarked on cultural diplomacy by organizing two traveling exhibitions of antiquities. The first exhibition toured the United States from October 1960 to March 1962; the second, nine European cities on the “free” side of the Iron Curtain from February 1963 to May 1965. ¹ Published in distinct national editions, the catalogue of this latter exhibition contained overviews of Thailand’s canonical art historical schools written by the renown French scholar, George Cœdès, and his younger colleague, Jean Boissellier.

An epigraphist by training, Cœdès had laid in the 1920s the foundations of Thai archaeology. Before his appointment in 1929 as director of the Hanoi-based École Française d’Extrême d’Orient (EFEO), Cœdès worked for 12 years in Bangkok, where he set up the Archaeological Service and organized the National Museum’s collection (Peleggi, 2013: 1538–1539). In the exhibition catalog, Cœdès (1964: 28) wrote: “The recovery of prehistoric implements in stone, bronze, and iron shows that the Neolithic civilization [in Thailand] differed little from the rest of Indochina and that the Bronze Age, much later than in Europe, started not much earlier than the Iron Age.” In the final book of his prolific career, originally published in 1962, Cœdès returned to his theory of the “Indianization” (hinduisation in the original French text) of early Southeast Asia by remarking that “even in prehistoric times, the autochthonous peoples of Indochina seem to have been lacking in creative genius and showed little aptitude for making progress without stimulus from outside” (Cœdès, 1966: 13).

Back in 1934, as director of EFEO, Cœdès had appointed a Swedish archaeologist, Olov Janse, to head excavations at Dong Son, where in the 1920s, a colonial customs official had discovered several stone and bronze artifacts, including the famous ritual bronze drums that are named after that site. In 1929, Victor Goloubew published these findings in the EFEO Bulletin where he argued that the Dong Son drums had been manufactured in China sometime between the first century BCE and the first century CE. Goloubew reiterated his hypothesis at the First Congress of the Prehistorians of the Far East, held in Hanoi in 1932, suggesting that prehistoric bronzes that had been recently discovered in the Dutch East Indies were the result of technological diffusion through Indochina. Janse, on his part, conducted three series of excavations at Dong Son between 1934 and 1939, on the basis of which he confirmed Goloubew’s hypothesis of the Chinese origins of Southeast Asian metallurgy, but antedated the artifacts to the fourth–third century BCE. Janse also suggested that bronze tools and weapons had been introduced in the region by “Chinese pioneers” or “Sinicized Thais” (i.e., Tai populations from southwestern China), who had presumably settled in the Dong Son area and intermixed with the indigenous “proto-Malayan” people (Cherry, 2009: 94–99).

By contrast, knowledge of Thailand’s prehistory progressed little during the first half of the twentieth century. At the outset, a founding member of the Siam Society (established in 1904) had lamented that, unlike in French Indochina, “prehistoric and presumably aboriginal relics have hitherto failed to come to light in this region [Central Thailand], except in exceedingly rare driblets” (Gerini, 1904: 213). A quarter century later, two other Siam Society members reported: “So far no Paleolithic implements have been found within the confines of present-day Siam … as no systematic research work has hitherto been undertaken” (Kerr and Seidenfaden, 1930: 80). New discoveries had to wait, however, for only in 1955 was prehistory added to the curriculum of the Faculty of Archaeology at Silpakorn (Fine Arts) University.

The turning point was the Thai-Danish expedition of 1960–1961, the results of which were presented in four volumes published over 12 years (van Heekeren, Knuth, Sørensen, 1967–1988). The expedition recovered in the western province of Kanchanaburi human remains dating to the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. In 1963–1964, the University of Hawaii-FAD expedition, under the direction of Professor W. G. Solheim II, excavated sites in northeast Thailand as the first stage of the US National Science Foundation-funded Archaeological Salvage Program. Its objective was to excavate five sites before they were turned into water reservoirs under the Khong River Basin Development Project, one of the several large-scale infrastructures that were built in Thailand in the 1960s to promote the Green Revolution, itself a major nonbelligerent facet of the Cold War in Asia (the phrase “Green Revolution” was coined, tellingly, by W.S. Gaud, a former USAID director). The apparent correlation between prehistoric sites in Isan and the Neolithic and early Iron-Age sites discovered earlier in the western provinces pointed to the territorial diffusion of “a distinctive prehistoric culture” (Solheim and Gorman, 1966: 179–180). During the Archaeological Salvage Program’s second and third seasons in 1965–1968, bronze artifacts and casting implements as well as spillage were recovered at Non Nok Tha, Khon Kaen province (130 km southwest of Ban Chiang). Radiocarbon dating, later proved erroneous, prompted the groundbreaking hypothesis that northeast Thailand’s bronze culture was the world’s oldest—1000-years older than China’s and at least a century older than the Indus Valley’s (Solheim, 1968). The subsequent findings at Ban Chiang appeared to confirm this hypothesis, at least initially.

Ban Chiang and the beginnings of world metallurgy

Over the years, the discovery of prehistoric Ban Chiang has been cast as a classic tale of archaeological serendipity. Take this retelling excerpted from a New York Times article:

It might just rank as one of the biggest accidental discoveries in archaeology. In the summer of 1966 a Harvard student named Steve [sic] Young was living in a village in the northeastern reaches of Thailand, going door to door canvassing political opinion for his senior thesis, when he tripped over the root of a kapok tree. As he hit the ground he found himself face to face with some buried pots, their rims exposed by recent monsoons. Intrigued by the look and feel of the unglazed shards, he knew enough to bring them to government officials in Bangkok. What he had stumbled upon is now viewed as one of the most important prehistoric settlements in the world. (Finkel, 2008)

In fact, by the time Young arrived in Ban Chiang, pottery fragments had been surfacing for a decade. Potshards casually found by a community doctor in 1957 were stored in the village school. Three years later, the school’s headmaster sent some samples to the chief officer of the FAD regional office in Udon Thani, where they aroused little interest (FAD, 2009: 41–42). Young, however, thanks to his status and connections, was able to show his finds to a noted scholar, Prince Boriphat, who in turn passed it onto the FAD Bangkok headquarters, where the first analysis of Ban Chiang pottery was produced and eventually published, first in a report and then a preliminary study by FAD archaeologist, Chin Youdi (1970, 1972). The fragments were examined also by Elizabeth Lyons, a Bangkok-based American art historian who acted as a consultant to FAD. In April 1967, after Lyons reported that the potshards showed no resemblance to pottery from other parts of East and Southeast Asia, the FAD director general, Dhanit Yupho, ordered test excavations at Ban Chiang. Samples were sent to the University of Pennsylvania for thermoluminescence analysis, which produced a startling dating of ca. 4600 BCE (White, 1982: 16).

Further road construction led to the discovery of larger deposits of painted ceramic pots and bronze artifacts that were extensively looted and illegally exported to be sold to local private collectors and overseas museums. It took some time before FAD could legally enforce ownership over still-interred artifacts by virtue of an act promulgated in July 1972 (four months after the royal visit to Ban Chiang), which widened the scope of the 1961 legislation on national antiquities (FAD, 2009: 45). The act was incidentally the 189th “Revolutionary Decree” enacted by the National Executive Council which in 1971 had abolished the constitution and reintroduced martial law, and which was overthrown by the epoch-making mass demonstrations on 14 October 1973. The Northeast Thailand Archaeological Project (hereinafter NTAP) was conducted in the short-lived period of “open politics” that lasted from October 1973 to October 1976, when the first elected governments in a decade reoriented foreign policy (diplomatic relations were established with the People’s Republic of China in 1975) and initiated the reduction of the massive US military presence in the country.

The structure of NTAP was more egalitarian than prior joint archaeological missions, with a Thai and an American codirectors: Pisit Charoenwongsa, a FAD official who had received a master’s in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 (Smith, 2014: 1371); and the slightly older Chester Gorman, a Californian with a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Hawaii who, as Solheim’s assistant, had been conducting research in western and northern Thailand. There, in the Banyan Valley (Mae Hong Son province) and in the limestone rock shelter known as Spirit Cave, Gorman had located traces of early rice cultivation. He was appointed codirector of NTAP immediately after joining in 1974 the Anthropology Department at the University of Pennsylvania (Solheim, 1982). Funded mainly by the US National Science Foundation with additional support by the Ford Foundation, NTAP saw the involvement of several Western scholars (including British archaeologist Charles Higham, based at the University of Otago, New Zealand), and also provided training opportunities for Thai archaeology students. Srisakara Vallibothama (1997), emeritus professor of archaeology at Silpakorn University, questioned however NTAP’s egalitarian nature by claiming that the Thais acted as assistants to American archaeologists in order to establish connections useful to obtain scholarships to study in the USA. FAD being part of the civil service meant that possession of an American university degree would jumpstart one’s career or buttress one’s position.

The first excavation season at Ban Chiang was concentrated in a house yard that had been spared by antiquities looters. The area excavated in the second season was located in the middle of a road, closer to the center of the prehistoric settlement’s mound (White, 1982: 16). Overall, the two seasons yielded 18 tons of pottery, stone, and metal artifacts; 126 human skeletons; and a large amount of faunal remains. Few of these findings could be examined locally, so burial objects were sent for analysis to the University of Pennsylvania, human bone to the University of Hawaii, and animal bone to the University of Otago. Based on test results, the NTAP codirectors hypothesized the presence of

a concentration of Ban Chiang-like sites lying in a wide arc around Northeast Thailand’s northern Khorat Plateau. Ban Chiang, itself, appears to be only one small, but important, site of what we are now calling the Ban Chiang cultural tradition. By the beginning of the 4th millennium B.C., this tradition was firmly established across the northern Khorat Plateau; during the next 4000 years the story of its social and technological advancement is clearly recorded in the layers of the numerous mounded sites known to exist across the rolling plains of the old plateau … If our picture of prehistoric man in Thailand is still far from mirror clear, we do have enough evidence to know that we are uncovering the remains of a technically innovative, and for the 4th millennium B.C. amazingly advanced society. The initial settlers of Ban Chiang were already adapted to a lowland, rice agricultural technology; they were skilled hunters, craftsmen, potters, and, before the end of this initial phase, had either developed or somehow gained access to the technology of bronze metallurgy. The wealth of bronze, the astounding number of pots, the scarcity of weapons of war, and the ritual slaughtering of animals during funerary rites, all of which occur throughout the site, attest to a long period of economic prosperity, security and stability. (Gorman and Charoengwongsa, 1976: 17)

The evocation of “a long period of economic prosperity, security, and stability,” moreover, provided a suggestive, if unintentional, contrast to the contemporary conditions of a region that had endured the Cold War’s bloodiest war by proxy.

The preliminary report on the Ban Chiang excavations was published in a monographic issue of The University Museum’s journal, where the Copernican revolution in the knowledge of Southeast Asian prehistory was likened to the technological revolution of radiocarbon (C-14) dating (Muhly, 1976). Donn Bayard, an American archaeologist based at the University of Otago who had participated in the excavations at Non Nok Tha, summed up the new state of knowledge: “it is clear that advanced cereal agriculture was present in the area well before the traditional date of 2500 BC. Similarly, the evidence for bronze metallurgy before 3000 BC is becoming more and more impressive … new data will deal a mortal blow to diffusionism as a major explanatory device” (Bayard, 1980: 108–109). In a later report for the Thailand Research Fund, Vallibothama (1997) remarked, possibly with a tinge of irony, that American archaeologists had “liberated” Southeast Asia from the cultural subordination to India and China imposed on it by colonial archaeology.

The hypothesis of an Isan Bronze Age older than China’s generated much excitement domestically along with the reevaluation of a region long vilified as culturally backward. Evident is the analogy here with the reappraisal by the New Archaeology of native Americans’ inventiveness, which was emphasized “to a much greater extent than diffusionist explanations had done,” with the result that native Americans were placed “for the first time … on an equal footing in this respect with Europeans and other ethnic groups” (Trigger, 2006: 409). But the metaphorical “liberation” of Southeast Asia’s past from the constrictions of colonial knowledge was no less biased ideologically than colonial archaeology’s, for it mirrored the US geopolitical goal of replacing the colonial governments of Indochina with Western-oriented liberal democracies free from the influence of both the Communist bloc and the Non-Aligned camp. While this goal was eventually frustrated by the communist victories in Indochina, military hostility was countered by commonality in archaeologists' objectives across the ideological division, as illustrated in the next section.

Parallels, controversies, revisions

Diffusionism was the target of archaeology also in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), which received impetus by the establishment in 1968, at the height of the war, of the Institute of Archeology in Hanoi. In a reverse of the Thai situation, Vietnamese students went to Moscow from the early 1960s onwards to study archaeology, while Soviet archaeologists trained students and led excavations in northern Vietnam. This collaboration shaped the direction of archaeology in the DRV, which, mirroring Soviet trends, became dominated by the preoccupation of locating the origins of the Viet people. The Neolithic and Bronze Age sites discovered in northern Vietnam were construed as evidence of the historicity of the earliest kingdoms mentioned in the Vietnamese historical annals, which colonial scholars had instead dismissed as legendary (Cherry, 2009: 106, 109–110, 118–128).

Reviewing archaeology’s advances in the DRV, Bayard (1980: 98) argued, “The view presented is thus essentially similar to that from Thailand: a largely indigenous development of technology and society.” Yet, as far as Thailand was concerned, neither a biological nor cultural connection could be established between the Khorat Plateau’s prehistoric settlers, presumably originating from the Chin River basin (and perhaps as far as Central Vietnam), and the Tai-speaking groups that had settled in Isan since the fourteenth century (Vallibothama, 1979, 1980). As for the Tai Phuan who had settled in the Ban Chiang area as late as the eighteenth century, they possessed no significant metallurgical skills (Breazeale and Snit, 1988: 5). The conjecture by Sangvichien (1978), a doctor who likened the physical features of prehistoric skeletal remains from Ban Chiang to present-day Polynesians’ (among those “proto-Malay” populations that the advance of Southern Mongoloids into Southeast Asia had supposedly pushed into Oceania), was corroborated by the NTAP forensic anthropologist, Michael Pietrusewsky (1982), for whom the human skeletons exhumed at Ban Chiang bore similarities with samples from Indochina and Indonesia.

Even more critical was the question of dating. The hypothesis that northeast Thailand was one, if not the world’s oldest metallurgical region rested on the early dating originally proposed for the finds. Gorman and Pisit’s tentative working chronology of the Ban Chiang archaeological sequence comprised six funerary phases spanning three and a half millennia: from 3600 BCE to 250 BCE. To this latter phase belonged the characteristic earthenware vessels covered with a buff slip and painted with swirling red bands. ² Gorman’s untimely death in 1981 prevented him from revising this preliminary chronology, which was based on radiocarbon analysis from the first excavation season only, and did not take into account the analysis of burial remains that was conducted at The University Museum in the late 1970s.

The revision was the subject of a doctoral dissertation submitted in 1986 at the University of Pennsylvania by Joyce White, a student of Gorman’s. By then White had already curated the pioneering exhibition, Ban Chiang: Discovery of a Lost Bronze Age (White, 1982), which toured twelve American cities from 1982 to 1986, and was on view in Singapore for one more year before finally landing at the Ban Chiang Museum, where it was displayed in a new wing built with funds from the John F. Kennedy Foundation of Thailand. ³ White’s dissertation blamed a faulty correlation established between the first and the second season’s archaeological sequences for the far too early dating proposed in 1976 for bronze artifacts. By taking into account new data (including the finds of excavations conducted in the early 1980s at Ban Nadi, Khon Kaen province), White proposed a sequence of 10 ceramic phases spanning 3600 BCE–200 CE, and dated the beginning of the Ban Chiang bronze culture to ca. 2000 BCE (White, 1986: 125–127).

By the late 1980s, more accurate dating of artifacts and human and animal bone invalidated the theory of a Southeast Asian Bronze Age predating China’s (let alone Mesopotamia’s), notwithstanding continuing disagreement about the beginning of the Bronze Age in the Khorat Plateau (Higham, 1983, 1996; White, 1988, 2008). The new image of Southeast Asia’s prehistory that had emerged since the 1960s was thus qualified but not rejected. According to White (1988: 179), “It is the appropriate selection and development of techniques and artifact types over time that makes the Southeast Asian metallurgical province an example of indigenous innovation.” By shifting emphasis from the chronological primacy to the technological and typological distinctiveness of Southeast Asian metallurgy, the region’s aptness at innovation was restated. This reiteration suited the expectations of economic growth the end of the Cold War raised in the region at the turn of the 1990s—expectations the Thai government of the day encapsulated in the slogan, “Let us turn Indochina’s battlefields into marketplaces” (Peleggi, 2007: 182).

Conclusion

As the Ban Chiang exhibition opened in Philadelphia in 1982, and a Prehistory Gallery was inaugurated in the same year at the Bangkok National Museum for the dynasty’s bicentenary, Pisit Charoenwongsa wrote a poignant meditation on the outcome of the discoveries not just for the international scientific community, but also for the Ban Chiang village community:

Without the accidental discoveries in 1957 by a local villager and the subsequent archaeological work (beginning in 1967), Ban Chiang would have remained an ordinary village like thousands of others in dusty, impoverished northeast Thailand. There would be no T-shirts bearing the now familiar painted pottery motif; there would be no replicas of ancient urns for sale in shops; there would be no tourists either from within Thailand or from distant parts of the world; it is possible there would have been no looting and therefore no decimation of the archaeological treasures which once lay beneath the town. (Charoengwongsa, 1982: 13)

According to the Guide to Ban Chiang National Museum (FAD, 2009: 109), “18 tons of material, including one and a quarter million pottery shards in 5000 bags, over 200 pots, and 2000 other artifacts were sent to The University Museum for analysis.” The New York Times quoted Joyce White verbatim as remembering crates of excavated materials arriving from Ban Chiang at The University Museum in the late 1970s: “There were what archaeologists call small finds—bronze bracelets, clay rollers and so on. And there were bags and bags of broken pottery” (Finkel, 2008). This material, though never acquisitioned, has since been on loan to The University Museum (staff downsizing in 2013 made the museum’s retention of the Ban Chiang collection conditional on self-funding ability [White, 2013]). In addition to findings officially shipped abroad for analysis, large quantities of looted Ban Chiang artifacts were flown overseas from the Udon Thani military airbase, as acknowledged by Stanford University’s Archaeology Center (http://www.stanford.edu/group/chr/drupal/ref/ban-chiang). Specimens of Ban Chiang pottery vessels entered the collections of major art museums, including the Freer and Sackler Gallery, Washington DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. ⁴

The international dispersion of Ban Chiang artifacts never caused the degree of public outrage that in 1988 fuelled the campaign for the return of a carved lintel pilfered from the mountain temple of Phanom Ruang, also in Isan, then on display in the Art Institute of Chicago (Keyes, 2002). Yet the cessation of looting was the precondition for Thailand’s nomination of Ban Chiang to the World Heritage Committee submitted in 1990. The nomination document stated that, after “much unlicensed and destructive digging … [t]he village community has now learned the cultural importance of the site (and also its commercial potential in attracting tourists, for whom villagers are providing facilities), and as a result they are now zealous in preventing any form of pillaging” (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/575/documents). Following its centralist policy, FAD promoted collective ownership of cultural properties through tourism-related activities (notably, a cottage industry of pottery replicas), not community-based archaeology; yet Ban Chiang failed to become a popular tourist destination. ⁵ The institutional attempt at assimilating non-Tai, non-Buddhist Ban Chiang to the heritage of “Thai-land” was also weakened by the nationalist glorification of the latter through the realization of so-called historical parks at Ayutthaya, Sukhothai, and other monumental sites—a project that drew the best of the FAD resources throughout the 1980s (Peleggi, 2002).

More successful has been the contrary attempt by Professor Srisakara and his associates to use evidence of Isan’s Bronze Age to challenge Thailand’s ethnocentric narrative and tackle the question of the origins of the Thais. The first salvo was fired by Sujit Wongthes, founding editor of the monthly Sinlapawatthanatham (Art and Culture), who argued that the early settlers of the Chaopraya River basin, commonly regarded as Thailand’s geographic core, were not Tai-speaking migrants from Yunnan, but ethnically diverse though culturally kindred populations that occupied an area spanning northern and northeastern Thailand to northern Vietnam (Wongthes, 1986). Based on aerial photography’s growing documentation of prehistoric mound and moat sites across the Khorat Plateau, Srisakara celebrated Isan as the earliest civilizational basin in Thailand (Vallibothama, 1990). By relocating Thailand’s birthplace from the Chaophraya basin to the Khorat Plateau and antedating its birthdate from the thirteenth century CE to the third millennium BCE, this alternative narrative of national origins tailored the finds of 1960s and early 1970s American archaeology to a domestic framework of knowledge that in light of its increasing acceptance calls for a separate analysis.